◎ Yang Honghui
| After dozens of years of rapid development, China’s rubber machinery industry encountered development bottleneck, which is the labor pains of industrial adjustment and upgrading, we must make efforts in these aspects such as “innovation, greening, intelligence and upgrading”, do certain things and refrain from doing other things, overcome the difficulties and realize overall upgrading of the products and the industry to make rubber machinery industry larger and stronger and realize the dream of a strong rubber machinery country. This is the information obtained by the journalist on “MESNAC” 2019 China Rubber Machinery Annual Conference held in Qingdao on October 21. |
Zhang Hongbo, director of China Chemical Industrial Equipment Association Rubber Machinery Specialized Committee as well as secretary and general manager of Party Committee of Guilin Rubber Machinery Co., Ltd., introduced that since the reform and opening-up, over 40 years of digestion, absorption and innovation, China’s rubber machinery industry achieved significant progress and had a dramatic leap in variety, quantity and quality, with the products recognized by the transnational tire companies in the world. Among the ranking of Top 36 rubber machinery companies in the world, more than a dozen enterprises from China have been listed for 14 years in a row and China’s rubber machinery sales revenue has exceeded 1/3 of the total sales revenue of global rubber machinery. However, China’s rubber machinery industry also encountered some difficulties in recent years, the sales revenue and profit of the industry declined by nearly 10% and the amount of exports was halved in 2018; in the first half of 2019, although the sales revenue had a year-on-year two-digit growth, the overall profit of the industry declined sharply, the demand in the second half and the next year also hit a record low, the industrial development encounters a bottleneck and the situation is difficult to become better.
It is learned that at present, China’s rubber machinery industry faces four main problems: firstly, the products have severe structural surplus and the capacity has low utilization rate, it is difficult to have the good days in earlier years; secondly, America started a trade war against China, the tire and rubber machinery are listed in the schedule of tariffs, the newly-added tariff of over 25% basically blocks the road for exporting China’s rubber machinery to America; thirdly, the government reinforces its governance on environment, the demand for traditional rubber machinery is reduced in the short term, but the demand for eco-friendly rubber machinery increases for the long run; fourthly, China’s tire industry has an overall upgrading, the requirements for stable, intelligent and automatic degree of the equipment increase, overseas rubber machinery suppliers come back, which results in rise instead of fall in China’s import of rubber machinery in recent years.
Therefore, Li Dongping, honorary director of Rubber Machinery Specialized Committee, thought that China’s rubber machinery enterprises should not be complacent over sales revenue’s being top xx in the world. He analyzed the ranking conditions of top 75 tire enterprises in the world in recent ten years and thought that the status of top 5 was difficult to be shaken, the proportion of whose sales revenue in total global tire revenue had been 50%~60% stably, however, the total sales revenue of the listed 20-30 tire enterprises from mainland, China only occupied a proportion of about 14%. The tire giants in the world, and even the tire enterprises from Taiwan, China and India were relatively stable, but China’s tire enterprises had a relatively large change in recent years, it could be said that “the king flag has been changing on the top of the city wall”, however, the sales market of China’s rubber machinery enterprises was mainly in China and mainly for new tire enterprises, which resulted in large fluctuation in development of rubber machinery enterprises.
Li Dongping thought that with complete varieties of rubber machinery, China had a great potential. It should aim at the global tire giants and pay attention to the non-tire rubber products industry occupying 50% of the sales revenue of the tires, the large market of rubber machinery industry, instead of competing in price in China. In addition, he expressed that informatization and intelligentization possessed late-mover advantages and were the technologies for China to win, and the traditional enterprises should enhance the research on such aspects, advocate “competing with technology” and put an end to vicious competition.
Fan Rende, honorary chairman of China Rubber Industry Association, thought that China’s rubber industry and rubber machinery industry were in a phase of transformation and upgrading at present, and digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing were the only road. In the future 10~20 years, the tide of digital transformation would sweep all the industries, the traditional enterprises would either nirvana and rebirth or fall to the bottom of the value chain. He expressed that influenced by domestic and overseas economic situations, the development of China’s rubber industry also encountered difficulties and might had a negative growth in this year, which was closely related to the fall in output and sales of automobile industry. However, the rubber industry still had some positive trends, such as growth in profit rate of tire enterprises and improved concentration, which indicated that the economic structural adjustment of China’s rubber industry made progress and the intelligent manufacturing achieved preliminary results. He hoped that the rubber machinery enterprises can fully exchange their experience to promote intelligent development of rubber industry.
He Ning, chairman of MESNAC, expressed that although China’s rubber industry faced the adverse factors such as Sino-US trade friction and “double anti” sanction, it was also having profound changes, industrial upgrading led by Industry 4.0 and intelligent manufacturing technology and new economic development zone advocated by “the Belt and Road” injected new vitality to development of China’s rubber industry and promote China’s rubber industry to have industrial transformation and upgrading and high-quality development.
To be specific to rubber machinery industry, although it faces the influence of decline of automobile industry and indefinite domestic and overseas economic environment, its future development also possesses favorable factors: firstly, constantly increasing car parc will constantly drive the development of tire industry and the demand for rubber equipment; secondly, the integration of global leading tire enterprises gradually becomes weak and the released sale scale of rubber equipment become larger stably; thirdly, the industrial upgrading led by intelligent manufacturing is recognized by more global customers, which brings about more market opportunities. For example, MESNAC carried out in-depth R&D and industrial promotion and application in the aspects of improvement of product quality and application of intelligent technology, at present, the products of MESNAC have covered 80% of the equipment in the whole production process of the tires, the solutions at three levels, product, workshop and factory, can be provided according to the demand of the global customers.
On the conference, the tire enterprises as well as rubber machinery and supporting enterprises carried out experience exchange on intelligent manufacturing. After the conference, the representative also visited the manufacturing base of MESNAC.
