The inevitable trend in China's machine tool industry: taking the path of independent innovation

2010-01-25 09:00

The Chinese motion control market is hot, but "hot" doesn't mean the current volume is huge. Rather, it means that globally, the focus is on China, where growth is rapid and market potential is enormous. From a global perspective, motion control technology is developing fastest in Asia, and the biggest highlight within Asia is China.

　　The CNC machine tool market accounts for roughly half, or even more, of the global motion control market. The rapid development of the domestic CNC machine tool industry is impressive. Many years ago, when I worked for Siemens China, I was specifically responsible for the CNC market. At that time, most Chinese machine tool factories produced manual machine tools, and CNC machine tools were merely a high-end research and development topic. However, upon returning to China, I've seen many domestic machine tool factories shift to primarily producing CNC machine tools. Core CNC technology is also well-developed domestically, such as Guangzhou CNC and Huazhong CNC. The active manufacturing of CNC machine tools in China inevitably drives strong demand for motion control components. On the other hand, the application of motion control technology in the current domestic general market (GMC market) is relatively weak. The general market mostly involves special machinery, such as the complex motion control designs in the electronics manufacturing field. There are also high-end packaging machinery, printing equipment, etc. In these special machinery design and manufacturing fields, the design is often not done in China, and the domestic market is only in its initial stages.

　　Many domestic manufacturers have now realized the importance of independent innovation. They have an inherent need to develop a control system with independent intellectual property rights that they can control themselves. This requires someone to provide them with supporting products and platforms. Because domestically, the overall situation is still in a learning stage, lacking experience in flexible application.

　　Servo manufacturers, CNC manufacturers, and machine tool manufacturers each have their own strengths, and this is where their respective values lie.

　　For OEM machine tool manufacturers, another very important topic is user-friendly design. That is, for a good CNC system, how can design engineers translate their design ideas, through the human-machine interface or CAD/CAM system, to effectively convert the machine operator's intentions into language that the machine can understand and execute.

　　Regarding the current global negative impact caused by the US subprime mortgage crisis, I don't believe it will significantly affect China's machine tool industry. For the machine tool industry, China is primarily a large domestic market. The Machine Tool Association's annual report shows that the amount of machine tools we produce each year, especially high-end CNC machine tools, is not very large for export. At the same time, we import a large number of machine tools from Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, and Taiwan each year. China is a large consumer of machine tools, and this consumption capacity even exceeds China's own machine tool production capacity, especially in the high-end field.

　　The impact of the US subprime mortgage crisis on the global economy this year is obvious. If we analyze whether the impact exists at the domestic demand level, the answer is yes, and this will also include some investment from US companies in China. However, I believe that the Chinese economy as a whole will continue to grow steadily. Looking ahead to next year, there will be considerable growth space domestically. Even in the worst-case scenario, if the Chinese machine tool market does experience some contraction, it will still be much smaller compared to the European and American machine tool markets. My view on this is cautiously optimistic.

The company manufactures and develops full-hydraulic winches for foreign customers, which are shipped abroad for assembly and use on offshore oil drilling platforms.

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