Interview with HID Dredgers: Developing new types of dredgers to meet more market needs

HID Dredging Equipment Company has over the years developed to become one of the leaders in dredge manufacturing industry.

This success was built on a platform of extreme commitment to its customers, meeting their specific application needs through the design and engineering customization.

A lot of successful deliveries and some other important business achievements gave us enough good reasons to interview Ms. Bella Wang, Global Director of Sales and Management for HID Dredging.

Q: As an introduction to some of our readers who are not familiar with your company, what can you tell us about your business, the beginnings and where is HID Dredging Equipment Company today?

Ms. Bella Wang: Shandong Haohai Dredging Equipment Company, known as HID Dredgers in the international market, has over 30 years of dredger manufacturer workmanship since 1990, and is a leading professional & innovative dredger manufacturer and supplier with a presence in more than 40 countries covering Middle East, Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, West America and more.

Since 1987, our Chairman, Mr. Yongsheng Wang has started to research and innovate dredgers, all started with his question: “how to extract sand from the rivers?”, then in 1992, the 1^st set of sand mining machine was produced, with the following years, we have researched and innovated more than 10 series of dredging equipment such as Cutter Suction Dredgers, Sand Mining Dredgers, Amphibious Machine, Sludge Solidification Equipment, Logistic Barges, Jet Suction Dredgers and more and gained 36 patents. Our brand is known as the pioneer in China’s dredging industry.

Our company in total covers an area of nearly 100,000 square meters. We have in total of 6 large manufacturing workshops and over 100 dredger designers, engineers, and manufacturers to enable large production and efficient productivity.

Also, our in-house Product Testing Pool is 1200 Square Meters to ensure zero defects before shipping out of the factory.

For the past 30 years, we have in total manufactured and supplied over 600 dredging equipment to the globe, with our mature dredger manufacturer skills and excellent after sales services, our brand has won client’s heart.

Today, HID dredgers continue to focus on designing and manufacturing the best quality dredging equipment, continue to research and innovate new type of dredging equipment to meet more market needs and to build a hundred-year dredger brand.

Our Mission is to be the Solution Provider to the Global Ecological Dredging and Provide Customer the Best Suitable Equipment for their Dredging Work.

Q: Which markets are currently in the focus of your company, and do you have plans to expand your business areas?

Ms. Bella Wang: Bangladesh is the country we are focusing on now. There are hundreds of rivers need to be dredged. In fact, since 2016, we have established our sales and services office in the capital Dhaka city, to better meet our local clients and provide after sales services to ensure performance.

So far, we have supplied more than 30 sets CSDs to this market, just last month – November 2020 we shipped out 3 sets of our new 20inche CSDs to Chittagong Port. Right now, even with the pandemic situation, our dredgers are still dredging there, some of our dredgers are 3-5 years old and still running perfectly in Bangladesh. And we are ready to close a few more by 2020.

We want to start to focus on Egypt market because it is becoming a market that in need of CSDs to work on their rivers.

Although we don’t have CSD there, but with our building history and services, we are confident that we will gradually prove our abilities and win trust.

We also are planning to partner up with some local Egypt companies to work together on supplying our CSDs.

Q: HID Dredging recently launched their full set of dredging equipment in Suya Lake and new amphibious dredger HID-CE-200 Clay Emperor. Our readers would like to find out more about this project?

Ms. Bella Wang: Suya Lake is Asia’s Largest Artificial Lake, it needed immediate dredging works to deepen and widen the lake to reopen the navigation channels. China Railway Group which is a Fortune 500, finally chosen our company to be the solution provider for a full set of dredging equipment to work on this lake.

In total, we have provided 5 sets of our 26inch cutter suction dredgers (HID-CSD-6024 model), 2 booster pumps, 2 sets of multipurpose workboats, 1 large 40M floating pontoons and a few of our small transportation barges.

Our 26inch CSDs was having the best discharge performance compared to other dredgers they hired, the 1^st set named “Chuxin 1” dredged 1,499,966 cubic meters in a short few months. Our captains and service people was also on-site providing 24/7 services and made sure the performance and dredging works was running smoothly.

Our recent delivery of our amphibious dredger was a versatile machine that will be working in ponds to dredge mud. The client was very interested in the fact this machine could do multiple work applications at the same time, such as cutter dredging, backhoe dredging, piling, weed raking, all it takes is to change the attachments within 30 mins.

Q: Overall, 2020 was challenging around the globe in many ways, how did you sail through that period?

Ms. Bella Wang: At the beginning of 2020, around January 25^th, all companies in China had to close since everyone has to stay at home. It was very challenging because we couldn’t work, meanwhile there wasn’t specific timeline on when we can start again. Fortunately, our business operations were back to normal around Mid-February with extreme caution.

Our business is half domestic focus and half international focus, the international markets were very slow due to pandemic which caused delay in the dredging projects, luckily, we were still able to supply to the global market this year due to some immediate dredging demand.

Domestic market has been creating a lot of internal dredging demand, and we worked with a lot of Government biddings this year. 

Q: What is your opinion about current dredging market in your country?

Ms. Bella Wang: The dredging market in China has always been good, especially the country has a strong focus on the looks of each city. A lot of rivers and lakes needed to clean, especially this year, the Government has approved more works that require dredging equipment in bidding format to create internal demand. We have participated in around 10 biddings so far this year, and won 8 of them, some of the machine we provided this year was 10-16inch cutter suction dredgers, weed cutting machine, floating pontoons.

We predict China’s dredging market will be good at least for the next 5 years.

Q: What are your most important goals and business plans for the upcoming period?

Ms. Bella Wang: Next year, our goal is to serve at least 50 dredging works with at least 60 dredging equipment delivered to the globe. We have been talking to a lot of potential client and know that the international demand is gradually coming back, with our strong brand reputation in the market and the focus on dredger quality, performance, services, we are confident the goal will be achieved.

In the next 1-3 years, our goal is to set up sales and services stations in our main markets such as India, Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, Europe and more, potentially start to establish factories in these markets too.

We want to better serve our clients and provide lifetime technical assistance, better in their country. We are also currently upgrading the technology on our existing dredgers and developing new dredger types to meet more market needs.

Our Chairman believes in innovations and technology, he once said: “Science and technology are the primary productive forces.”