Text | Zhang Jiaru

Do you know about a rural brick factory that ventured into high-tech fiber optic cables and became a giant valued at hundreds of billions?

In 1980, in Hekou Town, Rudong County, Jiangsu Province, young Xue Jiping was suddenly appointed as the director of a loss-making rural brick and tile factory. In less than two years, Xue Jiping turned the “Hekou Brick” into a “Chinese Famous Brand” of that era, and the brick factory also became profitable.

However, just as the brick and tile factory was thriving and accumulating millions in funds, Xue Jiping ordered a transformation.

What did the brick factory transform into? The answer surprised many—high-tech fiber optic cables. At a time when computers were not yet widespread, a group of people used to dealing with mud trying to make fiber optic cables was considered a pipe dream; some predicted that “the day they start work will be the day they go bankrupt.”

But time proved Xue Jiping’s vision was correct.

More than thirty years later, the former “brick and tile factory” has grown into a leading global communications and energy giant, with diversified industries including optical communications, smart grids, new energy, marine equipment, and new materials.

This brick and tile factory is the predecessor of Zhongtian Technology, a communications and energy giant. Today, amid the AI wave sweeping the world and exploding demand for computing power, data needs to race along the “light-speed highway.” Zhongtian Technology’s special high-core-count optical cables are exactly this “light-speed highway,” helping the company reach a market value of hundreds of billions.

Recently, Zhongtian Technology’s stock hit a record high, with a market capitalization once surpassing 100 billion yuan. As of March 6, the closing market cap was 93.45 billion yuan.

What has happened behind this?

The three bold bets of the brick factory director behind the hundred-billion market cap

Born in 1951, Xue Jiping grew up in the most remote and impoverished rural areas of Rudong. Due to various reasons, after graduating from middle school, he returned to farming but kept waiting for an opportunity to change his fate.

In spring 1979, the Rudong Construction Bureau selected 150 kiln workers to support the Anhui Farm Brick and Tile Factory, with Xue Jiping leading the team. Within a year, the brick and tile factory turned a profit.

Seeing Xue Jiping’s ability, his superiors entrusted him with another important task: becoming the director of the old Hekou Brick and Tile Factory in his hometown. In less than two years, he helped the factory turn profitable again and accumulated several million yuan in assets.

But Xue Jiping had higher ambitions. “Every year, the county holds an industrial awards ceremony. Those sitting in the front are from machinery, electronics, textiles, and chemical industries, and only at the end are us muddy folks. I felt this shouldn’t be our final path.”

So, Xue Jiping went to the Shanghai Cable Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the 23rd Research Institute of the Ministry of Electronic Industry to investigate. Experts told him that fiber optic cables, which use optical fibers for communication, are high-tech products and the future of information communication.

Xue Jiping was excited and then made a bold gamble: to produce fiber optic cables!

By 1992, Haimen Building Materials Factory had partnered with a company under the Chinese Academy of Sciences to establish Nantong Zhongnan Special Cable Factory, mainly manufacturing and selling flame-retardant wires and cables. Haimen Building Materials Factory was the renamed Hekou Brick and Tile Factory in Rudong County, completed in 1991.

Initially, the transformation faced significant pressure. Many questioned, “How can a mud-slinging worker produce high-tech fiber optic cables?”

In response, Xue Jiping sought expertise through various channels, first resolving foreign exchange quota issues, then purchasing advanced cable manufacturing equipment from Switzerland, establishing the country’s first communication industry production line. Meanwhile, to address talent shortages, he invited experts, trained employees, and organized production around the clock.

Within six months, his team developed China’s first large-diameter 960-core strip-shaped optical cable.

If Xue Jiping’s first bold gamble was to keep Zhongtian Technology alive, his second was to make it stronger.

In the late 1990s, he noticed that the threshold for terrestrial optical cables was lowering, and price wars were emerging. Meanwhile, China had been absent from the submarine cable industry—considered the “crown jewel” of the cable industry—for over a century since its inception in 1850.

To compete at sea, Xue Jiping launched his second bold gamble. This expansion was extremely challenging: submarine cables must transmit signals while enduring high pressure, corrosion, and complex marine environments.

In 1999, he organized R&D teams to start with underwater cables in the Yangtze River, gaining experience. Without a dedicated port, they used the dock at COSCO’s Yangtze River shipyard for experiments.

After years of research, Zhongtian Technology launched a series of products including submarine optical cables, submarine electrical cables, hybrid cables, deep-sea cables, umbilical cables, and cable joints. In 2011, Zhongtian’s submarine cables were the first to be exported to North America.

That same year, Zhongtian Technology held an industry expert consultation on entering the new energy sector. Out of 25 experts, 23 opposed it. At that time, China’s photovoltaic industry was under investigation for anti-dumping by overseas markets, and entering at that moment was akin to throwing money into the water.

However, Xue Jiping led the company to defy the odds and launched his third bold gamble. He believed that being at the peak might mean decline, but being in a trough doesn’t necessarily mean being buried. The key was whether the industry aligned with national strategic development.

Moreover, the transmission technology needed for photovoltaics closely integrates with the company’s existing cable and submarine cable technologies. The “communication + energy” dual-drive could smooth out cyclical fluctuations in a single industry, providing a stronger financial safety net.

Through these three bold gambles, Zhongtian Technology established a diversified industrial structure including optical communications, smart grids, new energy, marine equipment, and new materials, laying the foundation for today’s business.

Why did a “cable maker” become a trillion-dollar giant amid the AI boom?

Zhongtian Technology’s diversified industry layout has exploded in value during the AI wave, reaching hundreds of billions. You might wonder: with AI booming, why did a “cable maker” become so valuable?

If we compare AI large models to supercars racing through the data world, then fiber optic cables are the “light-speed highway” carrying them. No matter how fast the cars, if the road isn’t wide or fast enough, they’ll get stuck.

Therefore, the more AI flourishes, the more frantic the demand for building this “light-speed highway.” According to industry data, by 2025, demand for AI application cables is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 26%, far exceeding non-AI applications, with a 77% year-over-year increase.

Analysts from China Post Securities believe that Zhongtian’s high-density, large-core special optical cables will benefit, with market share expected to continue rising.

Public information shows that compared to ordinary cables, high-density, large-core special optical cables can pack multiple times the number of fibers into the same diameter conduit, with higher core counts, meeting the high-density, high-bandwidth transmission needs of AI data centers.

More importantly, Zhongtian Technology is one of the few domestic companies that has integrated the entire industry chain from preform rods to optical fibers to cables. As early as the early 2000s, when Zhongtian set up its fiber optic company, Xue Jiping realized that if core raw materials are controlled by others, there’s no room for bargaining.

At that time, fiber preform technology was monopolized by Japan and the US. Zhongtian Technology relied on “importing, digesting, absorbing, and re-innovating” to overcome this challenge around 2010, promoting the domestication of fiber preform production.

This full industry chain capability gives the company absolute control over costs and delivery speed.

If large cores are like “widening the road,” then Zhongtian’s “killer move”—hollow-core fiber—allows vehicles to travel at “supersonic” speeds.

Compared to traditional fibers, hollow-core fibers reduce transmission latency by about 30%, which is critical for AI large models requiring millisecond responses. Zhongtian disclosed that, based on its proprietary hollow-core fiber simulation and design capabilities, it has achieved large-scale deployment of O-band anti-resonance hollow-core fibers in domestic AI data centers and has entered China Telecom’s network trials.

In January this year, Zhongtian’s hollow-core fiber helped UAE telecom operator e& successfully complete the first hollow-core fiber trial in the Middle East, entering the international market.

Besides building the “light-speed highway,” Zhongtian also constructs “toll stations” for data transmission—optical modules.

Optical modules are core optoelectronic devices used in fiber optic communication, mainly converting electrical signals into optical signals and vice versa. Massive data must pass through these modules to access “fiber optic high-speed” transmission.

In November 2025, Zhongtian announced on its interactive platform that its full range of 400G optical modules based on three technical routes has been mass-produced and delivered, with 800G modules expected to be mass-produced within the year.

Thus, Zhongtian has completed a comprehensive AI infrastructure puzzle—from raw materials (“preform rods”) to transmission channels (“large-core cables”) to signal conversion hubs (“optical modules”), providing a full set of equipment from “core” to “end.”

Looking at this, Zhongtian’s leap from a rural brick factory to a trillion-yuan valuation giant seems to have caught the AI wave, but in reality, it’s the result of decades of steady accumulation and long-term strategic planning. The market’s reward is never for opportunists or lucky ones, but for those who have been honing their skills long before the wave arrives.