Long road behind unlikely industrial leaps

From a manufacturer of printer-toner making materials that polish silicon wafers to an outdoor clothing brand assembling a chip portfolio, the changes look abrupt, even improbable.

After the stark contrasts in business functions first caught my attention, I looked into the companies' histories and that made the evolution behind the changes clearer.

At first glance, their stories resembled a familiar tale of companies chasing a fast-growing sector. However, the dates and technical records told a different story — each leap was anchored in an older competence, and every new product had to survive the grind of trial, failure, adjustment and customer scrutiny.

Hubei Dinglong began developing CMP pads in 2012 and secured its first order in 2017. Its first order for a 12-inch CMP pad came in 2019. A company filing said qualification of a single pad model could take at least six months to a year even when testing proceeded smoothly.

Outdoor apparel and gear company Toread adopted its "outdoor plus chips" strategy in 2021. About five years later, chips accounted for 38.6 percent of its revenue in the first half of 2026.

GL Tech acquired the United Kingdom-based Loadpoint in 2016. Its domestically developed dicing machines began achieving batch sales in 2021, another five-year journey.

Qin Hongjian, chief financial officer of Jiangsu Yoke Technology, said in 2025 that once primarily a flame-retardant producer had spent 10 years completing its transformation into a diversified semiconductor materials supplier.

Taken together, those timelines changed how I understood the phrase "from zero to one". The starting point is rarely the day a company announces a new strategy. The breakthrough comes when a product passes qualification, enters a customer's production line and performs consistently enough to be ordered again.

That makes a comment by Zhu Shunquan, general manager of Dinglong, especially apt.

"In semiconductor materials, there are no shortcuts and no 'overtaking on a curve'," Zhu said in a recent interview. "The slowest path is, sometimes, the fastest."

The slowness comes from the industry itself. A material or machine may work in a laboratory and still be far from a production line. Customers require lengthy qualification, stable batches and proof that a supplier can protect yield and deliver consistently. One successful order is a technical milestone, but repeat orders show that manufacturing has caught up with invention.

Company disclosures show the scale of investment behind the transitions. Dinglong said it had invested more than 1.4 billion yuan ($208.18 million) in CMP slurry and abrasive-particle operations, while GL Tech said research and development spending had remained above 12 percent of revenue for five consecutive years, with technical personnel accounting for 47 percent of its workforce.

China's wider investment in research also helps explain why more of these transitions are emerging. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that the country's R&D spending rose from 2.4 trillion yuan in 2020 to 3.9 trillion yuan in 2025, while R&D intensity increased from 2.36 percent to 2.8 percent of GDP.

Industrial upgrading rarely happens in a single leap. These companies had spent years transferring knowledge, absorbing acquired technology and passing customer tests before new businesses began to reshape their revenue.