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"Six experts from Elkem have worked with our company for three years. They supported us in many aspects, such as technology, equipment management and on-site management," said General Manager Shui Min.

"We keep regular contact with nine expert teams through conference calls and video conferences," he said.

As its name suggests, Lanzhou Silicon's main product is silicon, the raw material for polysilicon and silicone.

"The company had bled money since its establishment in 2002. Such situation has gradually improved since 2011 when we started to use Elkem technologies," Shui said.

He told China Daily that a major technical support from Elkem experts was implementing continuous operation of the company's four electric furnaces.

"Before that, it was impossible to us. When those experts proposed it, many of our experienced employees doubted its feasibility," he said.

Now, the company's total annual production output has increased 10 percent to 50,000 tons, ranking it among the top three Chinese silicon producers. Elkem experts also helped Lanzhou Silicon replace manual control of electrodes in furnaces with an automatic operation system to improve the work accuracy.

"We actually bought the system many years ago, but no one knew how to use it," Shui said.

In addition, the company introduced a data acquisition and recording system from Elkem dubbed the "Dragon System".

"Elkem has used the system for over 30 years, and I think it is very scientific and professional. The system can record the production situation in real time and reflect it in data and diagrams," Shui said.

"We can now easily find out the problems in the production process based on statistics instead of observations," he added.

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