Introduction
With the maturity of the manufacturing system, my country’s machinery manufacturing industry also has a place in the world. The sheet metal industry is the basic industry of the machinery manufacturing industry. With the rapid development of the economy, it has gradually formed its own development trend and context, and has been widely used in many industries such as automobiles, communications and electronics, machinery manufacturing, and shipbuilding.
After years of development, China’s sheet metal processing industry has gone global and has a certain market share among many customers around the world. According to statistics, there are more than 30,000 companies in China’s sheet metal processing industry, more than 1.8 million employees, an annual production of more than 40 million tons of sheet metal parts, and a total sales volume of 60 billion dollars.
Current status of sheet metal processing
Due to the rapid development of the sheet metal processing industry, sheet metal industry clusters have emerged in areas with faster economic development or developed manufacturing industries in China. For example, Shenzhen in the Pearl River Delta, Suzhou in the Yangtze River Delta, and Cangzhou in the Bohai Rim Economic Zone have dozens or even hundreds of industrial clusters, forming relatively mature industrial chains that can be closed in the local area.
The good advantages of industrial clusters have attracted collaborative manufacturing platforms represented by cloud factories to settle in the local area. The platforms connect demand orders, link the idle production capacity of local enterprises to transform into collaborative production capacity, improve the utilization rate of factory sheet metal equipment, and help optimize and upgrade the local manufacturing structure through the industrial Internet.
Although there are many industrial clusters, there is still a certain gap between domestic enterprises and international leading enterprises. At present, ordinary sheet metal enterprises in China use domestic equipment with low utilization rate, low efficiency and technical bottlenecks in processing, so they are at the low end of the industry.
However, in recent years, with the improvement of the internationalization level of the industry, leading companies in the industry have gradually realized the gap and gradually established a complete manufacturing service system. The gap in technological level between these companies and related companies in developed countries has been significantly reduced.
Future Development Direction
The bright industry prospects have also intensified industry competition. Leading domestic and foreign companies have shared most of the sheet metal processing market, while other companies are competing for the remaining small part.
With the gradual expansion of China’s sheet metal processing market, competition among industry enterprises will show signs of polarization in the future. Weak enterprises will be eliminated in the fierce competition, while some advantageous brand enterprises will be further developed.
At the same time, China’s manufacturing industry is in a transition period of structural adjustment and industrial upgrading. The domestic manual sheet metal industry will gradually withdraw from the market, and the stamping sheet metal and CNC sheet metal that will replace it will develop well.
Under the general trend of building digital and intelligent factories, stamping sheet metal and CNC sheet metal will also become the mainstream of sheet metal processing technology in the future, and disadvantaged enterprises facing elimination may be able to turn things around by seizing new opportunities.
As world-renowned multinational manufacturing companies come to China for development, my country’s position as a world manufacturing center and a major consumer country is becoming increasingly prominent. With continuous technological advancement and economic development, the demand for sheet metal processing components in various fields will continue to grow. In the next five years, the industry scale will still maintain a growth rate of 10%-15%.
