Development Prospects of Middle-to-High-grade Machine Tools in China's Market

With the development of economy, the market share of medium-to-high end in China has been increasing year by year. The demand for medium-to-high-end CNC machine tools in the domestic market has also increased year by year. In a certain sense, there has been a certain impact on the market share of low-grade CNC lathes. Under such circumstances, it has become inevitable to increase the market competitiveness of China-made high-end CNC machine tools.

Subjectively speaking, the market share of high-end CNC machine tools is an important indicator to measure the competitiveness of domestic machine tool companies. The statistics for the first quarter show that China’s imports of machine tool products have increased by 61.9% year-on-year and have reached a record high.

However, the current situation of domestically produced middle-to-high grade CNC machine tools is: the quality will not go up, and the cost will not come. The reason is that on the one hand, the dependence of our high-end numerical control systems and functional components is too high on the one hand; on the other hand, we have not mastered the in-depth development of technologies, but only know what they are and why they are not. A high-end CNC machine tool is often a collection of high-end CNC systems and high-end functional components. For this reason, many domestic machine tool companies now consider that their products are not enough for secondary development on the CNC system, but only use those functions on the standard platform; even if the same high-end CNC system is used, domestic machine tool applications The level and the scope of adaptation are also limited. Therefore, it is particularly urgent to break through the development bottleneck of the CNC system and the main functional components. In order to accelerate the industrialization of medium-to-high-end CNC machine tools, it is imminent to accelerate the pace of industrialization.

Objectively speaking, currently the technical level of domestic CNC machine tools products has indeed been greatly improved, our scientific and technological research, 04 special scientific and technological achievements can be described as fruitful, but the pace of industrialization of high-end machine tools is still struggling. Our five-axis linkage can only sell half or even less than half the price of others. The key is that we do not have enough depth and breadth in software development, and our performance and quality do not go up. It is now necessary to conduct in-depth technology and research point industrialization techniques. Only in this way can product competitiveness be brought up.

Due to the deficiencies in our overall R&D system and other aspects, it is still difficult to comprehensively upgrade the industrialization level of China-made medium-to-high-end CNC machine tools in the short-term. We must, first of all, achieve breakthroughs in some key application areas. Take the automobile as an example. Although the domestically produced medium-to-high-end CNC machine tools have been used in the production lines of individual automobile companies, the key parts and components production lines for the leading products of automobile leading enterprises such as FAW, Second Automobile, Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, etc. No breakthrough was achieved. "From big to strong" is not a day's work. "Someone is now proposing that in the next five years, China's machine tool companies will have to become stronger."

Wu Bolin, chairman of the China Machine Tool Industry Association, believes that this goal is a bit high and unrealistic, and it can be done in a down-to-earth direction in a down-to-earth manner. At present, the domestic machine tool manufacturing enterprises are generally large and not strong, while the functional components and numerical control system enterprises are neither big nor strong.

Therefore, in order to promote the gradual realization of the goal of “change from big to strong”, the China Machine Tool & Tool Industry Association, after formulating the industry development plan, through preliminary detailed analysis and discussion, initially proposed three landmark goals: First, to the industry Major breakthroughs have been made in typical parts processing equipment for leading products in key service areas. Secondly, domestically produced numerically-controlled machine tools, especially medium-to-high-end CNC machine tools, have achieved a significant increase in the domestic market share, and the domestic and medium-to-high-end numerically-controlled machine tools have significantly improved the localization rate of the application of numerical control systems and major functional components. Third, a few or more machine tool products have become international famous brands, and a few or more companies have become strong companies in the world.