Nine Glorious Years, Kunlun Writes a New Chapter

December 18, 2009 marked the ninth anniversary of the founding of PetroChina Lubricant Company. Looking back on the year, Kunlun not only went against the economic downturn with strong profit momentum and astonishing sales results, but even more encouragingly, Kunlun Lubricant successfully developed epoch-making new additive technology and new-formulation Tianhong series products based on it. This laid a solid foundation for Kunlun Lubricant to stand on a higher stage in the future and, while accelerating the high-end rise of the Kunlun brand, will strongly push Chinese national lubricant brands to the forefront of the world.
In 2009, under the impact of the financial crisis, world economic growth slowed markedly and the global petroleum and petrochemical industry inevitably entered a deep freeze. China's petroleum and petrochemical industry was also affected to a certain extent, with a wave of lubricant companies suspending production or closing down. Amid the crisis and difficulties, the people of Kunlun Lubricant stood together and actively implemented the thinking of firming up confidence, strengthening the foundation and optimizing for improvement, and actively carried out a series of activities to raise sales, ensure growth, strengthen the foundation and promote development, achieving sales results that rose against the trend. Through the joint efforts of the whole company, all sales targets for the first three quarters of 2009 were fully met.
While sales rose strongly, Kunlun Lubricant took a far-sighted view of the future and accelerated the R&D and production of new technologies and products. As is well known, for market and technological reasons many domestic lubricant enterprises currently use foreign additive products and have abandoned their own research and development, leaving Chinese companies somewhat behind internationally in high-end vehicle oil products. However, Kunlun Lubricant has never given up the development of and investment in high-end technologies and products. In 2009, the salicylate additive that generations of researchers had devoted themselves to studying was successfully developed at the Kunlun Lubricant Lanzhou Research Institute. At the same time, this technology was rapidly commercialized, with the development of new-formulation Kunlun Tianhong diesel engine oils, transmission oils and rear axle gear oils based on the new technology, covering 8 major categories, 26 grades and more than 100 specifications. Kunlun's new technology and new products can reduce carbon deposits by 70 percent, and the newly formulated transmission and rear axle gear oils have an effective service life of more than 100,000 kilometers, with zero sulfur content in the high-temperature detergent.
Kunlun's new technology and newly formulated Tianhong products drew great attention and unanimous praise from the industry and laid the foundation for the future high-end rise of Kunlun Lubricant. In November 2009, at the promotion conference for the newly formulated Tianhong series products held in Taicang, Jiangsu, Ms. Liao Guoqin, General Manager of Kunlun Lubricant, said proudly that for Kunlun Lubricant the significance of the new formulation Tianhong products was by no means merely the arrival of a sub-brand with better cost-performance; more importantly, we successfully mastered a core technology capable of supporting the future renewal and development of Kunlun's vehicle products. This core technology, with independent intellectual property rights, will be applied over the coming years to renew more product lines under the Kunlun umbrella, forming a vehicle oil product portfolio with Chinese characteristics that stands shoulder to shoulder with the world's advanced technologies. Future competition in the lubricant industry is competition in core technologies, and Kunlun has successfully broken through the technological barrier. As General Manager Liao said, Kunlun Lubricant has found a path of take-off that will carry Kunlun's future development. Kunlun will stand at a new starting point and, along this path combining independent innovation technology with domestic operating characteristics, write even more brilliant chapters, while adding a heavy, colorful stroke to the development of China's national lubricants.