China: Cigarette Factory Passes Certification of Technological Transformation

Source from:  TobaccoChina Online 08/29/2011

Zhangjiakou Cigarette Factory in north China's Hebei Province - the maker of cigarettes of the competitive Diamond brand family - held a grand ceremony on August 18 to mark the total completion of its costly and time-consuming project of technological transformation and official certification of the project.

After conducting inspection for technical acceptance, the panel of inspectors carefully checked the results of technological transformation and issued a certificate of inspection to the cigarette factory. Started in March 2005 and basically completed in May 2009, the project of technological transformation of Zhangjiakou Cigarette Factory was executed in two phases in line with the principle of "general planning and separate fulfillment". In the four-year process of technological transformation, the cigarette factory newly built nearly 80,000 square meters of joint workshop structures including the new leaf tobacco cutting and cigarette making workshops, the power center, the raw materials elevated storage facilities, the finished products and support materials elevated storage facilities, the cut tobacco storage, the raw materials storage balances, and support housing for production and daily life of workers and staff members. With a total investment of 697.5333 million yuan (107.3 million U.S. dollars), the project of technological transformation of Zhangjiakou Cigarette Factory was the largest for it since it was incorporated in 1939. In the technological transformation, Zhangjiakou Cigarette Factory newly purchased two 6,000 kg/h leaf tobacco cutting lines. As a result of the technological transformation, Zhangjiakou Cigarette Factory saw its annual cigarette production capacity enlarged to 840,000 cases (42 billion cigarettes) in 2010 from the level of 690,000 cases (34.5 billion cigarettes) in 2006, with the annual amount of its taxes and profits increasing to 3.4 billion yuan (523 million U.S. dollars) in 2010 from the level of 1.72 billion yuan (265 million U.S. dollars) in 2006. Also as a result of the technological transformation, the cigarette factory now generally uses less manpower for both production and management, with the work efficiency obviously going up. In the process of trial production following basic completion of the technological transformation, Zhangjiakou Cigarette Factory smoothly passed inspection for technical acceptance of its facilities for safety control, environmental protection, thunder prevention, prevention of occupational diseases, fire control, archives maintenance, etc, paving the way for safe operation of cigarette production. Enditem