China First Heavy Industries (CFHI) – YiZhong

China First Heavy Industries (CFHI) – also known as YiZhong – was founded in 1954 in the northern steel-belt Heilongjiang province of Manchuria and is now one of China's key industrial enterprises, still based there.

China First Heavy Industries is principally engaged in manufacture and distribution of heavy machinery products. The Company provides metallurgical equipment, including continuous casting equipment and rolling equipment; nuclear power equipment, including nuclear reactor pressure vessels, steam generators and others; heavy pressure vessels, including hot-wall hydrogenation reactors, coal liquefaction reactors and others; large castings and forgings, including rotors, blades and others; forging press equipment, including hydraulic presses and mechanical presses; forging equipment, as well as heavy mining equipment, including heavy mining shovels.

Its products are applied in industries such as metallurgy, electric power, energy, transportation, mining, petrochemical and national defense, among others. The Company also involves in provision of related technology services and transportation services.

While nuclear equipment accounts for only about 5% of its business, it can produce five sets of equipment for large PWRs each year. China First Heavy Industries (YiZhong) in the northern steel-belt Heilongjiang province, is perhaps the market leader in equipment manufacturing. It produces pressure vessels and pressurisers for nuclear plants up to 1 GWe. It also makes forgings for steam generators as part of a $340 million expansion which could see it outputting five reactor sets per year by 2015.

Its smaller peer Harbin Boiler Co has had much more luck supplying generators to coal fired plants at home and abroad but wants to make pressure vessels and steam generators for AP1000 reactors. Parent company Harbin Power Equipment Co Ltd has already supplied turbines and generators to China's four AP1000 reactors.

China First Heavy Industries produces pressure vessels for nuclear power plants up to 1080 MWe CPR-1000 (eg Hongyanhe1, Yangjiang 1-4, Ningde 3-4, Fuqing 1-2, Fangjiashan 1-2, Qinsahn II-4), steam generators for Yangjiang 1-3 and Ningde 3-4, pressurizers for Qinshan II-4, and pressure vessels for Chasma in Pakistan.

It is supplying some steam generator and pressure vessel forgings for China's first two AP1000 units as a subcontractor to Doosan, and is to supply AP1000 pressure vessel and steam generators for Haiyang 1, as well as CGNPC's first AP1000 units at Dafan/Xianning. It is producing three of the first four reactor pressure vessels for Hualong One units, as well as steam generators.

China First Heavy Industries grew out of the former First Heavy Machinery Works was found in 1954 and CFHI has currently become one of 53 state-owned largest manufacturing plants of the heaving engineering industry.

In 2008 total value of CFHI production was more than 12 milliards Yuan. CFHI corporation's structure includes design and research institute, National Engineering Research Center of Heavy Equipment as well as the world's largest production plant of the complete heavy equipment in Tianjin.

China First Heavy chairman committed suicide 04 August 2015 amid anti-graft inquiry. Wu Fusheng, 51, was found hanged in his office in Heilongjiang. The Communist Party’s graft watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, sent inspectors to First Heavy’s parent company on 06 July 2015.