China’s small but beautiful ‘little giants’ charged with punching above their weight

In China’s eastern coastal city of Ningbo lies a little-known manufacturer that makes one of the world’s thinnest amorphous-nanocrystalline alloys, more commonly known as magnetic “liquid metals”.

The stand-out of the product line are soft, nano-sized magnetic materials that measure no thicker than 14 nanometres. To put that into perspective, a human hair is around 80,000nm wide.