Innovation is the foundation for establishing a foothold in the mining machinery industry.
Release time: 2019-11-23
The mining machinery industry in China experienced its most difficult period in the 1990s. Starting from 1999, the industry began to recover, with enterprises emerging from losses and seizing a historic opportunity for development. However, at present, China’s mining machinery industry still has a relatively weak technological foundation. Since the reform and opening-up, the industry has relied primarily on exchanging market access for technology as a means of upgrading its product quality. At the same time, it faces the severe challenge of foreign competitors investing and setting up factories in China. Relevant experts recommend that China’s mining machinery industry should seize these opportunities and accelerate its development—starting first by making concerted efforts in scientific research, technological upgrades, and independent innovation.
The mining machinery industry in China experienced its most difficult period in the 1990s. After 1999, the industry began to recover, with enterprises emerging from losses and seizing a historic opportunity for development. However, at present, China’s mining machinery industry still has a relatively weak technological foundation. Since the reform and opening-up, the industry has relied primarily on exchanging market access for technology as a means of upgrading its product技术水平. At the same time, it also faces the severe challenge posed by foreign competitors investing and setting up factories in China. Relevant experts recommend that China’s mining machinery industry should seize these opportunities and accelerate its development—starting first by making concerted efforts in scientific research, technological upgrades, and independent innovation.
Currently, China’s mining machinery industry faces two major challenges: First, the overall strength of enterprises in the mining machinery sector is relatively weak. Most companies have virtually halted their investment of energy and resources in areas such as scientific research, new product development, technological upgrades, and enterprise management. As a result, domestic mining machinery products—especially critical equipment urgently needed for national infrastructure projects—fail to meet demand. Moreover, these products suffer from low technological content, low added value, unstable product quality, and low labor productivity across the board. Consequently, the growth rate of output value among Chinese mining machinery manufacturers is severely disproportionate to their profit growth rate. Second, there are significant issues regarding product variety, technology, quality, and service levels, which have led to a low actual contribution rate of the domestic mining machinery industry to the mining sector itself. Take metallurgical mines as an example: currently, there are 1,180 types of equipment in use, yet China can only independently supply about 26% of them. Moreover, most of the domestically produced equipment remains low in technological content and does not meet high-quality standards; the remaining approximately 74% still need to be imported. In particular, domestically produced equipment with high technological content—such as full-face tunneling machines, mining trucks, excavators, and loaders—still lags considerably behind imported counterparts.
To this end, experts have proposed ways to enhance the innovation capability of the mining machinery industry: First, the mining machinery manufacturing sector should establish various forms of collaboration with foreign companies and domestic specialized design institutes—such as forming groups, joint ventures, introducing advanced technologies, and recruiting talented professionals. At the very least, the industry should strive to adopt a joint-design approach on at least one specific engineering project, gaining initial involvement before gradually improving capabilities and achieving win-win outcomes.
Second, we should as soon as possible establish and improve application laboratories for our flagship specialties, conducting applied technological research on products and manufacturing processes. These laboratories should start at a high level and focus on practicality, covering experimental theories and methods, experimental equipment and scale, as well as control and testing technologies. Where necessary, we should introduce advanced foreign technologies.
Moreover, both domestic and international higher education institutions—not only serve as training bases for mining machinery technology professionals but also as the cradle for research into the fundamental theories and experimental techniques of mining machinery. We must leverage their strengths and engage in various forms of collaboration and partnership with them.
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