The machine tool is not really complicated.
China already dominates the technology for low- and medium-sized machine tools.
The challenge with high-end machines is not the difficulty of the technology, but rather its lack of profitability.
This situation is similar to the situation with the metal ball in a ballpoint pen in the past.
The market for high-end machine tools is limited and the development cycle can be very long.
If it involves starting from scratch rather than upgrading the model, the research and development of a mid-to-high-end machine tool can easily cost several hundred million RMB.
The R&D cycle lasts several years and returns are relatively limited.
Due to low demand and market fragmentation, the payback period may be more than ten years. The return on investment in high-end machine tools is even worse. For most mass-produced industrial production, high-end machines generation are not really necessary.
This machine is a fully automatic panel bender from Italian manufacturer Savanini, sold for one million euros. That is good? Yes it's very good. Bending workers will be impressed by it and sheet metal engineers will be thrilled by it.
However, is it necessary for mass production? It's hardly necessary.
In fact, today's mass production prefers semi-automatic machines and highly customized manual/semi-automatic equipment due to the high degree of control over processes, sequences and deployment locations, as well as their lower cost.
A well-established production line consisting of semi-automatic machines can achieve higher productivity than these state-of-the-art fully automatic machines at a comparable cost.
Even if full automation is required, the current trend is to have fully automated production lines consisting of industrial robots along with customized semi-automatic program-controlled machines/equipment.
These high-end machines are generally used to produce small quantities of products, such as customized products, prototypes, process testing, and so on. They are not only expensive to purchase, but also expensive to use and maintain and require specific education from operators. Therefore, its areas of application will be very limited, at least in the next two decades.
In this case, investing heavily in R&D of cutting-edge machine tools is not necessarily a very profitable behavior.
Preventing China from excelling in high-quality machine tools is mainly due to the market's limited size and returns.
There are still many people who believe that cutting-edge machine tools are some kind of advanced technology that China cannot surpass.
Some even use the Soviet Union's purchase of Japanese machine tools as proof of China's inability to manufacture them.
However, the Soviet Union has been gone for almost 30 years.
This mentality prevails in many traditional industries and it is an understatement for today's China to claim that it cannot develop a technology that was developed by foreigners 30 or 40 years ago, even after investing enough money.
It is not that China cannot manufacture a panel bender like the one produced by Savagnini, but rather that it is not willing to do so.
