My name is Wu Dejian. I am the founder of Dongguan Wu Dejian Tool Steel Co., Ltd. People in the industry often call me “Wu Dejian, the King of Tool Steel.” I come from an unknown small village in Shangrao, Jiangxi Province. My parents supported my sister and me through school by carrying bricks at a brick factory.
However, in 1993, no matter how early my parents started working or how late they finished, they still could not afford the tuition for two children. When I graduated from junior high school in 1993, I had no choice but to give up my dream of going to university and instead enrolled in a technical secondary school so that I could find a job as soon as possible.
After being admitted to a technical secondary school in Nanchang, I somehow ended up studying a four-year major in Mold Design and Application. Nanchang, the provincial capital, was the farthest place I had ever been in my life. My father and I took a green train and stood for 12 hours to get there. After completing my enrollment, I had only 300 yuan in my pocket. My father told me, “This 300 yuan is all we have for this semester. Spend it carefully.”
To make it to the end of the semester, I could only spend 1 yuan per meal: 0.6 yuan for rice and 0.4 yuan for vegetables. Six-tenths of a yuan could buy about 300 grams of rice, and I had a big appetite. With 0.4 yuan, I could only afford Chinese cabbage or carrots.
I spent my four years in technical school under such conditions. When I finally graduated, I was told that I needed 300 yuan to get my graduation certificate. I couldn’t afford it, so the certificate had to stay at the school temporarily.
Because my classmates were going to work in Fuqing and could earn more than 1,000 yuan per month, and I had no money to go elsewhere, they offered to help me buy a train ticket, which I would repay after receiving my salary. In 1997, I followed my classmates to Fuqing City and started working in an electronics factory.
After working in Fuqing for two years, news from my classmates in Dongguan made it impossible for me to stay calm. We were all migrant workers, but their salaries were more than twice mine. At the end of 1999, I went to Dongguan. During an interview, because I could fluently read out the tool steel grade “Cr12MoV,” I accidentally got into a mold base factory as a sales representative, selling mold bases and tool steel, and there I met my benefactor, Mr. Yuan.
After more than three years of ups and downs, I learned sales skills and helped my boss secure many orders. Because tool steel was closely related to my major, after mastering tool steel knowledge, I helped my boss solve many technical and business issues and gained his trust.
By 2002, I had saved 20,000 yuan and owned a smoking, oil-burning motorcycle. I started a semi-independent business: I no longer took a salary but continued selling tool steel. To reassure Mr. Yuan, I left my ID card and delivery notes at his company for safekeeping. Although the customers were developed by me, I never touched his customer resources.
At that time, the tool steel market in Dongguan was extremely chaotic. Inferior materials, fake products, and counterfeit steels were everywhere. In Liaobu Town, where I lived and worked, there were many connector manufacturers. Their molds required high-speed stamping and high precision, with strict requirements for burrs and dimensional accuracy. However, the tool steel often failed—either it was not wear-resistant, causing short mold life, or it chipped easily, creating burrs, deforming mold plates, and leading to dimensional defects. Frequent mold repairs seriously affected stamping efficiency.
Because of my professional background, I clearly understood how critical tool steel performance is to molds. From the very beginning of my business, I insisted on using genuine tool steel, helping customers solve problems and extend mold life. This earned repeat purchases and steady business growth.
Thanks to this bottom-line commitment to genuine materials and customer referrals, I secured tool steel business with more than a dozen connector factories in Liaobu and surrounding areas, and gradually accumulated some savings. In the second half of 2009, I began preparing to open my own factory, marking the start of my true entrepreneurial journey.
In May 2010, I rented a 120-square-meter shop in Changken Village, Liaobu, Dongguan. I installed a crane, purchased two band saws, stocked some tool steel, and officially started my tool steel factory. My first band saw was a second-hand machine that cost only 5,000 yuan.
After the 2008 financial crisis, customers began demanding higher product quality. The stamping factories I worked with increasingly processed hard materials such as stainless steel, high-strength automotive steel, and 65Mn steel. Requirements for burr control and dimensional accuracy became stricter, stamping clearances became smaller, and mold chipping occurred more frequently. Conventional tool steel simply could not handle these conditions.
Because of my technical background, I began thinking about how to improve the chipping resistance of tool steel through heat treatment to solve mold cracking problems. After years of exploration, I truly summarized some effective methods and successfully solved my customers’ mold chipping issues.
Factories care about efficiency. Because my tool steel lasted longer, more factories chose to purchase from me. Gradually, I gained a certain reputation within local industry circles.
In 2012, through customer referrals, Kyocera Dongguan contacted me via one of their suppliers. One of Kyocera’s molds had suffered a tool steel fracture and urgently needed a piece of SKD11 tool steel. Since it was only one piece, I initially didn’t want to take the order, but out of gratitude for the referral, I completed it regardless of cost.
Later, Kyocera’s inspection confirmed that the fractured tool steel from the previous supplier was counterfeit SKD11 made of substitute material, while the SKD11 supplied by Yuhui was genuine. As a result, Kyocera terminated cooperation with the former supplier. By coincidence, Yuhui Tool Steel became a supplier to the Fortune Global 500 company Kyocera—and has continued supplying them ever since.
As my business grew and markets evolved, combined with my hands-on experience in tool steel heat treatment, I began to think about optimizing tool steel performance from alloy composition and smelting processes. From the start of R&D, we deliberately avoided the chipping defects common in high-carbon steels. With strong support from steel mill engineers, we developed a high-hardness, high chipping-resistant tool steel, which I named 8566 Anti-Chipping Tool Steel.
After three years of small-scale validation from 2017 to 2019, 8566 tool steel successfully solved numerous mold chipping problems in stainless steel stamping, sharp-corner stamping, and narrow-edge stamping. It became a mature and proven product. In 2020, it was officially launched to the market. Combined with video promotion, it gained strong exposure. 8566 tool steel quickly became well-known nationwide and was specifically requested by many stamping professionals.
Because of its popularity, many competitors sensed “business opportunities” and began copying and imitating 8566. In the second half of 2020, counterfeit and shadow versions of 8566 appeared on the market.
However, in a booming market, the original innovator ultimately benefits the most. With continuous live streaming and video promotion, our brand awareness rose sharply, and more and more people came to me to solve mold problems.
In early 2020, BYD encountered cracking issues with aluminum cold extrusion molds for an automotive part. The molds cracked after producing only 500–600 parts. SKD11, DC53, and SKH-9 were all tried, with hardness adjusted between HRC 60–62 and 56–58, but the cracking problem could not be solved.
After multiple discussions with BYD engineers, drawing on the experience of 8566, I developed a high-toughness tool steel specifically to address cracking and aluminum sticking issues in cold extrusion molds. The first trial increased mold life to over 20,000 cycles, and later stabilized at over 30,000 cycles, completely solving the cracking problem.
BYD highly认可 this tool steel and promoted it internally. At that time, it had no formal name. Since it was used for cold extrusion molds, BYD engineers marked it as “Yuhui LG” on the drawings. Thus, the name LG Tool Steel naturally came into use.
Building on the success of 8566 and LG tool steels, we subsequently launched 8503 Non-Sticking Tool Steel and 8433 High Heat-Resistant Tool Steel.
Over time—through business expansion, accumulated cases, video and live-streaming practice, guidance from mentors, and personal insights—Wu Dejian Tool Steel has focused on 3–5 core tool steels featuring anti-chipping, high toughness, and non-sticking properties. Using independently developed and fully mature heat treatment processes, we have helped more than 4,000 companies solve complex problems in mold material selection, manufacturing, and application, and have extensively replaced equivalent steels from the world’s top three global brands.
Wu Dejian Tool Steel is no longer merely a tool steel distributor, but a pre-hardened tool steel manufacturer. I registered the company and trademark under my own name, staking my personal reputation and livelihood on the quality of our tool steel, and guaranteeing 100% “Three Guarantees” for mold users. These are commitments that our competitors simply cannot make.
Today, Wu Dejian Tool Steel is used continuously by three Fortune Global 500 companies. Kyocera has purchased our tool steel for seven consecutive years. In recent years, Huawei, BYD, Midea, Fotile, Panasonic, Valeo, and many other leading international and domestic brands have also become our customers. In the past six months alone, companies from tunnel engineering, defense industry, and aerospace engineering have approached us, and their trials have been successful.
If your molds are facing problems, if you are uncertain about tool steel selection, or if you have tried many tool steels without success, you are welcome to place a small trial order with us. I can serve not only as your tool steel consultant, but also help you avoid costly trial-and-error.
Wu Dejian Tool Steel — the user’s chief consultant.
Those who use it trust it.