At the China Standard Pencil Co in the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang province, a leading domestic pencil manufacturer, you can see the trucks outside the plant just waiting to get loaded up.

"Sometimes even the office workers have to go out into the plant to lend a hand with production and employees only get one day a week off at most,” said Song Huaiyi, deputy Party secretary of the pencil company.

But, even then, Song adds, sometimes the company has to refuse an order because of the increasing demand, with about 70-percent of its products going to Asia, Europe and the Americas by ship. These include wooden pencils and resin pencil leads and, now, with the increasing awareness of forest destruction, more and more, mechanical pencils and thin pencil lead as a major source of profit.

He goes on to say, “The mechanical pencil is expected to replace the wooden one and dominate the market by 2025, and we should make the change earlier,” then notes that they produced 140 tons of thin resin pencil leads last year, accounting for 9.33 percent of domestic output, having cornered the top model pencil lead market in China because of superior quality.

The company supplies many Chinese stationery giants, such as Shanghai’s M&G Stationery and its products sell in more than 60 countries, such as the US, Britain, India, Italy and Bolivia.