As a typical type of mechatronic products, CNC machine tools combine mechanical technology with CNC intelligence. The upstream mainly involves castings, sheet weldments, precision parts, functional parts, CNC systems, electrical components and other parts and components; the extensive downstream covers machinery, mold, automobile, electric equipment, railway locomotive, shipbuilding, petrochemical, electronic information technology and many other industrial industries.
Major machine tool producers include China, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Germany attaches great importance to high-tech, precise, sophisticated and practical CNC machine tools and accessories. It is highly specialized in R&D and production of various functional components, and ranks in the forefront in terms of quality and performance in the world. Japan focuses on the development of CNC systems, and machine tool companies herein keep an eye on the layout of upstream materials and components as well as integrated development of core products. The United States has strong competitiveness in the design, manufacturing and basic scientific research of CNC machine tools. China’s machine tool industry started late, but it develops rapidly, with significant growth in technology and market size. Now China has become the world’s largest machine tool producer, marketer and consumer, with high sensitivity to the market as well as fast response to sale and services.
Scale of Global CNC Machine Tool Industry by Country, 2019
As China’s high-end manufacturing represented by automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding, electric equipment, construction machinery and 3C industries require higher and higher performance and accuracy of CNC machine tools, the market demand for CNC machine tools in China, especially high-end CNC machine tools, has been increasing. Therefore, the market size is expected to expand steadily.
With the continuous deepening of the structural adjustment of China’s machine tool industry, the CNC level of machine tools has jumped significantly, but still heavily lagging behind developed industrialized countries; especially, China only sees 6% in the localization rate of high-end CNC machine tools which are mainly imported. This means a huge opportunity for domestic substitution in the future.
By region, Chinese CNC machine tools are dominated by East China where the market size of CNC machine tools reaches RMB180.5 billion with the share of 55% nationwide in 2019. The second-ranked Central South China secured the market size of RMB62.46 billion, accounting for 19% of the national CNC machine tool market. The market size of Northeast China, North China, Southwest China and Northwest China hits RMB38.92 billion, RMB 23.54 billion, RMB 17 billion and RMB4.58 billion respectively, accounting for 12%, 7%, 5% and 2% of the national CNC machine tool market separately.
Globally, Japan-based Mazak ranks first in the CNC machine tool industry with US$5.28 billion, followed by Germany-based TRUMPF and DMG Mori Seiki (a German-Japanese joint venture) with US$4.24 billion and US$3.82 billion respectively. Other players include MAG, Amada, Okuma, Makino, GROB, Haas, and EMAG.