China's Tool --- the Road of Localization

Such a title is a little helpless in fact should be called "Chinese tool manufacturers on the road to internationalization" more appropriate. Although domestic manufacturers represented by volume, Ha One Industry, Shanghai Industry and Plant Hard have accumulated some brand advantages in the decades of decline and rolling, they lack the core competitiveness of materials, coatings, tool systems, tool management, etc., which makes them often have only price advantages in the market competition, and smaller technical and brand advantages. And with many tool factories in China, such as Sandvik Coromant, Kennametal, Seco, Walter, Sumitomo, Guehring, Fufu Se engineering and other companies, so that Domestic manufacturers must step up their own research and development efforts to improve their technical content. In fact, although the multinational company's tool sales into China, but involved in the core technology such as tool geometry design, powder metallurgical materials, such as strict control, which also greatly hindered the progress of China's tool industry.

In the automotive industry, for example, the automotive industry is the industry with the most dedicated tool applications and a measure of the level of tools in a country or company, where Kenner in the United States, Widia in Germany, Mapal, Guehring, Amvement in Japan, Mitsubishi, and even Taegutec and KORLOY in South Korea almost fill the market space. In some large automobile manufacturing plants, domestic tools may only account for about 10% of the total project, but the survival of Chinese tool enterprises in the bush is moving up step by step, the road to domestication has been mentioned on the agenda after all.

But this path is really a drag, with its innitive systemic obstruction. Take the car production line as an example, china in the introduction of car models and advanced CNC automatic production line of the initial, often do not pay attention to the domestic supporting technical problems of knives, did not improve the domestic car tool technology level in a timely manner. After the introduction of the production line, followed by imported special tools, tool variety specifications, process technology, high degree of specialization requirements, domestic existing tools, varieties, quality and service capabilities can not meet the requirements. At the same time, supporting perfect, ready-to-use dozens of foreign tool brands are in a state of apparent passivity.

Nevertheless, we cannot give up this seemingly tortuous path. The proportion of tool costs in developed countries abroad is rising, accounting for 2-4% of manufacturing costs. According to Dr. Su Guojian, an analyst at ING Automotive Market INC, China's car production in 2003 was about 1.54 million units, and the number of knives used in car production lines in a year was between 600 million and 700 million yuan. From abroad, the world's largest car production country is also a large tool production country, its car tool in the country's total tool production share of 30% to 40%. Japan, the United States and Germany not only account for 50% to 60% of the world's automotive production, but also as its equipment machine tool and tool output value accounted for 50% to 60% of the world's machine tool output value. U.S. automotive tool production value of 9 to 1 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 40% of its total tool market, Japan 700 million to 800 million U.S. dollars, Germany 600 million to 700 million U.S. dollars, have reached about 35%, forming a number of close ties with the automotive industry specialized tool factories and tool products, effectively supporting the sustainable development of the automotive industry.

Happily, Chinese tool makers have taken note of the problem. At the Nanjing Tool Industry Seminar in September, there was a consensus that to strengthen cooperation within the tool industry, competition gives way to cooperation to complete product production through cooperation. In fact, the road of localization, mainly related to several issues, first, the underdevelopment of the domestic machine tool industry directly caused the tool industry underdevelopment; Zhuzhou Diamonds uses a joint-stock system to avoid the disadvantages of state-owned enterprises, such as the factory director can own 1 million shares, many small and medium-sized tool manufacturers also use the joint-stock system.