In today’s rapidly developing landscape of fine chemical engineering and polymer materials, there is an entrepreneur who has always been deeply rooted in the front line of the industry, promoting Chinese material enterprises to the global stage with a professional perspective. He is Zhang Wei, General Manager of Shanghai JOY New Materials Co., Ltd.

Upon entering the headquarters of JOY New Materials in Shanghai, the reporter met this low-key yet highly forward-looking industry leader. With over twenty years of experience in the field, Zhang Wei has not only witnessed the transformation of China’s chemical materials from traditional manufacturing to intelligent applications, but has also participated in and led this change with steady and strong steps.

“Our company has always emphasized both technical understanding and application implementation,” said Zhang Wei, whose words, though few, are always to the point. The “understanding and implementation” he mentioned is not just a slogan, but the core logic behind the growth and development of JOY New Materials over the past decade.

Since taking office as the general manager of the company in 2011, Zhang Wei has led the strategic upgrade of the company from a single material distributor to a comprehensive solution provider. He has led his team to build a customer network covering multiple fields, including composite materials, electronics and electrical engineering, automotive manufacturing, new energy, and rail transit. They provide customers with customized material selection suggestions, technical matching analysis, and product performance consulting services, truly achieving the leap from “selling materials” to “selling solutions.”

Zhang Wei’s professional background has laid a solid foundation for his decision-making. After graduating from the polymer materials program at Qingdao University, he joined SK International Trading Co., Ltd., where he accumulated a systematic understanding of the material industry chain by starting from grassroots positions. During his tenure as the general manager of Shanghai Xikang Chemical Co., Ltd., he began to systematically engage in the management of material application engineering, laying an important foundation for the later strategic transformation of the company.

“I have always believed that materials do not exist in isolation,” Zhang Wei pointed out. “They are always embedded in specific application scenarios. To understand whether a material is suitable for a client, it is not enough to look only at its physical properties. It is essential to understand the client’s product process, end-use applications, and even the collaborative logic of the entire industry chain.”

For this reason, under his leadership, JOY New Materials has established a “cross-disciplinary” technical service team. The team members include not only engineers with backgrounds in material science but also experts from various industries such as electronics, electrical engineering, mechanics, and automotive. Zhang Wei emphasized, “We are providing customized B-end solutions and must understand the client’s language and configure materials from the client’s perspective.”

This approach has been reflected in several cooperation cases. For example, facing the dual requirements of lightweight and flame-retardant performance from new energy vehicle manufacturers, Zhang Wei led a targeted material matching study. Through multiple rounds of sampling with suppliers, data evaluation, and process adjustments, they successfully helped the client achieve both material substitution and cost optimization.

In addition to serving domestic enterprises, Zhang Wei has also focused on global resource integration. He advocates building a material supply chain with a global vision, emphasizing a strategy that gives equal importance to “domestic preference” and “international interconnection.” The company currently maintains stable cooperation with well-known international material companies such as DuPont, Dow, 3M, and Honeywell, and is also actively promoting the validation and application of domestic high-performance materials on a global scale.

“The competition of the future will not be just between individual products, but between solutions and systems,” Zhang Wei said firmly. What he advocates is an industrial cooperation model that starts from the technical logic at the bottom layer and outputs capabilities to the upstream of the market, rather than simply being an intermediary for imports and exports.

Zhang Wei has a clear judgment on the future of the fine chemical materials industry. He believes that with the increasing trend of greening and intelligent manufacturing, the core competitiveness of material companies will shift from “cost-oriented” to “performance-oriented” and “service-oriented.” In this context, the ability to achieve data-driven operations, platform integration, and cross-brand connections will determine whether a company has long-term vitality.

“Material selection used to rely more on experience and people, but now it relies on data and systems,” he revealed. The company is gradually promoting the iterative upgrade of its information management system in order to build a material service capability that can “respond quickly and make scientific decisions,” creating higher value density for customers.

Zhang Wei’s thinking does not stop at the level of business management but extends to the construction of the entire industry ecosystem. “We are not just material handlers; we hope to become ‘discoverers’ and ‘translators’ of material application value,” he said. In his view, the bridge between material science and end manufacturing requires not only technical understanding but also managerial organization and sensitivity and forward-looking judgment of industry trends.

At the end of the interview, Zhang Wei modestly said, “I have just done some things that go with the flow. I hope that we can present Chinese solutions more powerfully on the global material stage.”

This veteran of the industry has been steadily moving forward in the deep waters of material application for over twenty years. He knows well that the competition in fine chemical engineering is not a battlefield of price competition but a long-term battle of cognition and value. In this battle, Zhang Wei and his new material products are steadily making progress, fighting for a future for China’s material industry.