 |
China's Machine Tools to Regain Lost Market
China's providers of numerical control (NC) systems need a more market-orientated strategy to recover lost ground from foreign competitors, although a technological breakthrough has heightened hopes for a revival of the domestic NC industry, experts said.
Technical innovation targeted at developing products with huge market demand and corporate reforms would help sharpen the competitive edge of domestic NC system providers, said Liang Xunxuan, honorary director of the China Machine Tool Industry Association.
"Our target is, through our own efforts, to build up our market share from 10 per cent to 50 per cent in five years,'' he said during a recent seminar.
Although a technical quantum leap, achieved by a Wuhan-based NC system manufacturer, has made the technical blockade by foreign NC manufacturers redundant, domestic companies still only control a meagre share of the market, which is still dominated by the highly reputed foreign heavyweights.
Only 10 per cent of home-made machine tools are installed with domestic computerized NC systems.
"The numerical control industry in China should not follow in the footsteps of foreign countries,'' Chen Jihong, general manager of the Wuhan Huazhong Numerical Control System Co Ltd, said. "We have to turn to technical innovation instead of foreign counterparts.''
The company, which has an academic background, has developed the Huazhong I computerized NC system, which is the technical equal of foreign brands and is also much cheaper.
Expanding at a miraculous 300 per cent per annum in recent years on the strength of its home-grown technology and marketing reforms, Huazhong now leads the domestic NC systems industry, which is crucial for the upgrading of industry and the military.
Huazhong plans to increase its annual production rate to 4,000-5,000 sets of NC systems by 2005 and to establish research centres to develop new products, according to the general manager.
It also plans to go public on the stock market before the end of next year.
China's machine tool industry has been in decline over the past five years, largely due to low technical levels. As such, it surrendered a large share of the domestic market to foreign rivals led by Japan's Fanuc and Germany's Siemens.
Foreign NC heavyweights have been withholding information about new NC technology from their Chinese counterparts so as to keep their prices high.
In This Section
|