The basic pattern of the machine tool industry

The machine tool is a machine for manufacturing machines, also known as machine tools, mainly including lathes, milling machines, planers, drilling machines, boring machines, grinders, sawing machines, etc. The machine tool manufacturing industry provides a variety of machinery and equipment for various industries. It is the heart of modern industry, so it is also called the mother of machines.

With the continuous development of the machine tool industry, in the high-precision field, CNC machine tools have replaced traditional machine tools and become the absolute mainstream. Because of its important strategic significance, all countries attach great importance to the development of the CNC machine tool industry and take measures to support and protect it. In general machine manufacturing, the processing workload undertaken by machine tools accounts for 40%-60% of the total machine manufacturing workload. Machine tools play a major role in the modernization of the national economy. The core technology of the world’s machine tools is basically in the hands of a few developed countries such as Germany, Japan, and the United States.

Divided from the price and brand of machine tools, German Hammer, German Julang and other brands belong to the super first-class level, with almost impeccable design level and processing accuracy, and are often used in products with higher added value. In the second echelon, the main competitors include DMG of Germany, Stama of Germany, Mori Seiki of Japan, Toyota of Japan, etc. These brands are more popular than super-class brands. The main reason is that the output is large and the price is only 50%-80% of the first echelon.

Starting from the third echelon, we can see machine tool companies in the United States, South Korea, and Taiwan, such as Haas, Hyundai, and Taichung Seiki. For Chinese domestic brands, most of them are concentrated in the fourth to sixth echelons. The main features of the products are large holdings and low replacement costs, but the processing accuracy is relatively weak.

From the world’s machine tool export data, Japan, Germany, and Italy rank the top three respectively. Among them, Japan and Germany’s machine tool export value both exceed 10 billion U.S. dollars, and the third-placed Italy is only about 4 billion U.S. dollars. Since 2011, the export value of our country’s machine tools has also exceeded US$2 billion, but in contrast to the amount of imports, our country’s export scale still appears to be small, with imports reaching more than US$10 billion for four consecutive years from 2011 to 2014. It can be seen that our country’s machine tools still mostly rely on foreign imports.