Machine Tool Industry "Eleventh Five-Year": From Heavy Quantity to Heavy Quality

Editor's Note: During the “Eleventh Five-Year Plan” period, the Chinese machine tool industry achieved remarkable results. In the first year of the “Twelfth Five-Year Plan”, summing up the experience of the past five years, the prospects for planning the next five years are particularly important. On the occasion of the future, the newspaper invited the former chief engineer of the Machine Tool Bureau of the Ministry of Machinery Industry and the well-known expert in the machine tool industry to write a book entitled “11th Five-Year Plan for Machine Tool Industry: From Heavy Quantity to Quality”, reviewing China's machine tool industry. The development history of the year has provided suggestions for the goal of “12th Five-Year Plan” China to build a powerful machine tool.

When New China was founded, China only produced 1600 simple belt machine tools. By 2009, 582,000 gold-cutting machine tools had been produced, including more than 120,000 CNC machine tools. The output value and output of the machine tools were among the highest in the world. It can be said that China’s machine tool industry has been starting from scratch and has become the world’s largest machine tool producer. Although the process has been tortuous, the achievements are proud. Among them, during the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" period, the Chinese machine tool industry is gradually getting better, opening up the golden development period of the Chinese machine tool industry.

From volume to qualitative change From 2001 to 2009, the output of China's gold-cutting machine tools can be seen that compared with 2005, the output of gold-cutting machine tools in China increased by 28%. In 2009, the output of CNC machine tools was 2.4 times that of 2005. The numerical control rate of production increased from 13.2% in 2005 to 24.8% in 2009, and the numerical control rate of machine tool output exceeded 50%.

In 1993, China’s production of gold-cutting machine tools hit a record high of 262,000 units. From 1994 to 2010, the machine tool industry was in an adjustment period. The annual production of machine tools was maintained at around 200,000 units. In 2003, it jumped to 300,000 units. In 2005, it jumped to 500,000. Taiwan, which reached 608,800 units in 2007, is incomplete statistics. In 2010, the output of machine tools will reach a record high. From the second half of the last century to the beginning of this century, the industrialized countries are providing high-precision, high-efficiency, compound, energy-saving (material), and green products to users with high degree of integration, and the output has gradually declined. In the United States during the Second World War in 1942, the output of Jinqi Machine Tool had reached an annual output of 300,000 units. During the Korean War of 1952, it produced 223,000 units annually, and then the annual production volume gradually dropped below 100,000 units. In 2007, Japan produced 106,157 gold-cutting machine tools, which was the highest in developed countries. The output of CNC machine tools was 82,356 sets, and the numerical control rate of production was 77%. The numerical control rate of output value was close to 90%. In 2008, the numerical control rate (%) of the major national gold-cutting machine tools was: 87.8% in Japan, 90% in Germany, 76.7% in the United States, 62.1% in India, and 58.48% in China.

At the beginning of the 21st century, labor productivity in China's equipment manufacturing industry was much lower than that in industrialized countries. Labor productivity in the German equipment manufacturing industry was eight times that of China, and Japan was 7.9 times that of China. At present, China's GDP accounts for only 8% of the world, while the production of gold-cutting machines accounts for 60% of the world's output. This shows that the equipment we provide is of low quality and consumes large amounts of energy and raw materials. In the future, China's manufacturing industry must speed up independent innovation and technological transformation in the structural adjustment and transformation of production methods, and require the machine tool industry to provide high-tech, high value-added equipment for users to create more efficient equipment, which is the general trend.

During the “Eleventh Five-Year Plan” period, China eliminated 115.72 million tons of backward iron production capacity and 66.83 million tons of steelmaking. In 1949, China’s Steel output was 150,000 tons, and it took 47 years to reach an annual output of 100 million tons, from 100 million tons to 200 million tons in 7 years, and after 2003 almost annually increasing production by nearly 100 million tons. Steel is expected to be 2010. The output reached 600 million tons and the production capacity exceeded 700 million tons. In the future, the steel industry will follow the path of sustainable development in accordance with the scientific concept of development, and output will grow rationally. Steel is the main object of machine tool processing, and the growth rate of output will slow down, providing the machine tool industry with a signal of reduction in quantity and quality.

The largest customer automotive industry in China's machine tool industry produced the first car in 1956. By 1992, it had reached an annual output of 1 million cars. In 2000, it reached an annual output of 2 million cars. In 2009, it produced 13 million cars. In 2010, China produced cars annually. Up to 17 million vehicles have already become the world’s largest automotive output country. It is expected that the output growth will inevitably be decelerated due to the constraints of energy, roads, and the auto industry itself for some time to come. Nowadays, the cold processing technology of China's major auto companies has achieved high-speed cars, high-speed milling, high-speed grinding, high-speed gear hobbing, aluminum alloy turning and milling speeds of up to 1000m/min, and ready to move to 3,000m/min, gradually adopting turning and milling centers for small and medium-sized structural complex parts. , milling center, grinding center, and so on, the equipment requirements more refined, efficient, highly reliable, complex, green.

The information provided by upstream raw materials to downstream users requires the machine tool industry to shift from heavy quantity to quality improvement, and provide users with high-tech-supported equipment. At the same time, the machine tool industry itself also achieves sustainable development with low material consumption. .

There are a large number of processing centers in China, but the technical content is low. There are several thousand machine tool companies in China, and there are nearly one county in one county. From the market demand, there is no need to increase new production capacity such as ordinary lathes, economical CNC lathes, and wire walking machines.

In the direction of high added value, China’s existing machine tools have a backward production structure and a large quantity and low quality. In 2007, 231 major machine tool companies produced 470,000 gold-cutting machine tools, with a production rate of 21% and an output value of 57%. Among them, 209,825 lathes and 54,380 CNC lathes were used, with a production rate of 25%, which means that the production of cars in the year accounted for 75% of the production of lathes. Industrial advanced countries have gradually reduced or did not produce ordinary lathes in the second half of the last century. In addition, in China's CNC lathes, the economical number of CNC lathes accounts for the majority, and it does not have the ability to increase efficiency more than twice as much as a universal CNC lathe.

In 2008, the output of China's machining centers ranks third in the world, while the output value is behind Japan, the United States, Germany and South Korea. The market share of China's machining centers accounts for more than 50% of the total market value, accounting for only 32%. Domestic automotive, aerospace and other companies rarely use domestic processing centers. Imported machining centers have high-end and mid-range, so in the future not only will they need to speed up the development of high-end CNC machine tools, but also must increase their efforts to increase the market share of mid-range and above CNC machine tools.