Cummins in China

March 19^th, 2022 by Cummins CCEC

The history of Cummins and China can be traced back to the 1940s more than half a century ago. On March 11, 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act to provide wartime aid to 38 countries, including China. The “Lend-Lease Act” military aid to China includes patrol boats and military trucks equipped with Cummins engines.

At the end of 1944, a Chongqing enterprise sent a letter to Cummins, seeking to establish business contacts and localize the production of Cummins engines in China. Erwin Miller, then general manager of Cummins Engines, expressed his strong interest in this letter in reply, hope that Cummins can build a factory in China after the Sino-Japanese War. For well-known reasons, Mr. Miller’s idea could only be expected to become reality three decades later, in the 1970s, with the gradual easing of Sino-US relations.

Cummins and its affiliated subsidiaries have invested more than 1 billion US dollars in China. As the largest foreign investor in China’s diesel engine industry, Cummins’ business relationship with China began in 1975, when Mr. Erwin Miller, then chairman of Cummins, visited for the first time. Beijing became one of the first American entrepreneurs to come to China to seek business cooperation. In 1979, when China and the United States established diplomatic relations, at the beginning of China’s opening to the outside world, the first Cummins office in China was established in Beijing. Cummins is one of the earliest western diesel engine companies to carry out localized production of engines in China. In 1981, Cummins began to license the production of engines in Chongqing Engine Plant. In 1995, Cummins’ first joint venture engine plant in China was established. So far, Cummins has a total of 28 institutions in China, including 15 wholly-owned and joint ventures, with more than 8,000 employees, producing engines, generator sets, alternators, filtration systems, turbocharging systems, aftertreatment and fuel for systems and other products, Cummins’ service network in China includes 12 regional service centers, more than 30 customer support platforms and more than 1,000 authorized distributors of wholly-owned and joint ventures in China.

Cummins has long insisted on forming strategic alliances with large Chinese enterprises to achieve common development. As the first foreign-owned diesel engine company to come to China for localized production, Cummins has established four engine joint ventures with leading Chinese commercial vehicle companies including Dongfeng Motor, Shaanxi Automobile Group and Beiqi Foton for more than 30 years. Fourteen of the three engine series are already produced locally in China.

Cummins is the first foreign-owned diesel engine company to set up a R&D center in China. In August 2006, the engine technology R&D center jointly established by Cummins and Dongfeng was officially opened in Wuhan, Hubei.

In 2012, Cummins’ sales in China reached 3 billion US dollars, and China has become the largest and fastest-growing overseas market for Cummins in the world.