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Guangwei's 40-year arc: from a failing township factory to the carbon fiber backbone of Weihai's rod industry

August 8, 2026 · 5 min read · Rods · Carbon Fiber

The story of Weihai’s rise as the world’s rod-making capital begins with a desperate rescue. In the late 1980s, Chen Guangwei, founder of what became Guangwei Group, took over a failing township petrochemical equipment factory and spent more than 150 days and nights building China’s first domestic production line for fishing rods. The company pivoted to rod manufacturing with no capital, no technology and no equipment, and in doing so seeded an industry that today supplies nearly 60 percent of the world’s fishing rods.

Guangming Daily, the central Chinese newspaper, revisited that arc in an August feature on Weihai’s tackle cluster. The piece is a useful milestone document for overseas buyers, because it explains in one place how Weihai moved from simple OEM assembly to owning the materials, the standards and the brands of the industry.

From imported prepreg to a domestic carbon fiber breakthrough

Rod making began as a labor-intensive business in which factories relied on simple assembly and white-label orders from overseas, with core production equipment controlled by foreign companies. The turning point came with carbon fiber. Because of its light weight and high tensile strength, carbon fiber gradually became the preferred material for mid-range and premium rods, and Guangwei was the first to launch carbon rods on the domestic market in 1995.

The problem was that carbon fiber prepreg, the pre-impregnated material at the heart of modern rod blanks, had to be imported. As aerospace demand for prepreg tightened, China’s rod makers faced long supply lead times and prices dictated by foreign suppliers. Localizing rod-grade prepreg became an industry imperative.

Su Yi, general manager of Guangwei Outdoor Equipment and president of the Weihai Fishing Tackle Association, described the effort to Guangming Daily: while expanding horizontally across tackle categories, the company also pushed upstream into raw materials, developing both glass fiber and carbon fiber prepreg. After thousands of trials spread over years of repeated experimentation, Guangwei broke through, ending what Su called decades of overseas technology blockade.

The result went beyond one company. Domestic materials cut raw material procurement costs for rod factories across Weihai and shortened supply cycles, laying the foundation for the whole cluster’s upgrade.

A full-chain cluster with 15 shared technology wins

Weihai now operates as an integrated supply chain. Upstream, the cluster concentrates core raw material producers of carbon fiber prepreg, glass fiber cloth and resin. Midstream, it produces the full range of components: rods, lines, reels, guides, reel seats and lures. Downstream, sales channels span wholesale distribution, brand retail, live-stream e-commerce, cross-border sales and trade shows. In 2025, Weihai exported fishing rods worth 2.45 billion yuan (approximately USD 340 million), or 47.4 percent of China’s total rod exports.

The cluster’s most recent push has been automation. Because the industry traditionally depended on manual labor, Weihai led its leading enterprises to build a fishing tackle manufacturing innovation center, jointly developing automated equipment suited to the industry. So far the center has cracked 15 common technical challenges, including automatic thread-winding assistance and automatic injection molding for realistic lures, driving the transformation of the entire Weihai tackle supply chain.

Handing, the e-commerce-born rod brand, has become the showcase of that automation drive, with a fully unmanned production line handling more than 30 processes. Guangming Daily’s feature repeats the figures already reported elsewhere: 50 percent higher efficiency, 30 percent lower costs and 80 percent less manpower on the line.

A collective trademark for global branding

The feature also highlights Weihai’s branding experiment: the registration of “Weihai Fishing Tackle” as the industry’s first collective trademark, managed under strict usage rules. Under a “collective trademark plus individual trademark” matrix, small and medium factories can borrow the regional public brand to reach overseas consumers directly, capturing brand premiums that individual factories could not command on their own.

For international buyers, the practical meaning of this 40-year arc is that Weihai no longer sells anonymous labor. It sells controlled materials, standardized components, automated production and a regional brand — the infrastructure of a mature industry rather than a low-cost workshop.

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