PPG Industries  provided all coatings products for contestants in the Auto Body Painting Contest portion of the 2014 “Chevrolet Cup” National Automotive Application and Repair Skills Competition. This is the sixth consecutive year PPG has supported the event, which took place at the Secondary Vocational School of Automotive Engineering in Wuxi, China.
The event – hosted jointly by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Communications and the Jiangsu Municipal Government, and sponsored by the National Transportation Vocational Education Steering Committee, China Automotive Maintenance Industry Association, Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education and Wuxi Municipal Government – attracted 37 delegations from across the country and more than 400 secondary vocational school students studying automotive repair skills. After the competition, Sun Shouren, president of the China Automotive Maintenance and Repair Trade Association, and Pauline Yuen, PPG vice president, refinish coatings and light industrial coatings, Asia, presented the awards.

“PPG strongly supports training for the automobile maintenance industry, and the use of our coatings in this event is a testament to the importance of our products in the industry,” Yuen said. “China’s rapidly-developing automotive industry is in urgent need of maintenance professionals, which is why PPG makes it a priority to sponsor events such as this one. We hope contestants will apply what they have learned to realize their personal goals and create value in this growing field.”

To support China’s vocational training efforts, PPG initiated a school-enterprise cooperative program in 2004, became the first international coating supplier to launch a training program here for professional spray coating, and signed a school-enterprise cooperative agreement with the Ministry of Education in Beijing in 2011. So far, PPG has signed agreements with 56 vocational schools across the country to establish joint training centers, and 25 of them use the company’s eco-friendly waterborne coatings.

A leading automotive coatings maker and early creator of waterborne basecoat for refinish applications, PPG advocates “green” automotive maintenance and was the first in the refinish industry to launch online training for waterborne basecoat application. PPG has built training centers in China to share its leading technologies and proven programs, and to help improve vocational education and create an environment for cultivating skilled professionals. In addition, the company connects campuses with the workplace by regularly offering students hands-on training opportunities.