Plastic machinery industry has developed rapidly, and its development speed and main economic indicators are among the top 194 industries in the machinery industry. Plastic machinery annual manufacturing capacity of about 200,000 sets, a complete range, ranked first in the world.
At present, there are nearly 400 major plastic machinery manufacturing enterprises in China, about 200 large and medium-sized enterprises, and 10 top-scale backbone enterprises. Emerging plastic machinery enterprises have a series of characteristics, such as scientific and technological innovation, system innovation, management innovation and so on. They have attracted the attention of their peers at home and abroad.
China's plastic machinery enterprises are mainly located in the southeast coast and the Pearl River Delta. Ningbo has the strongest momentum of development. It has become the largest production base of injection moulding machines in China. Its annual production accounts for more than 1/2 of the total annual output of domestic injection moulding machines and 1/3 of the world's injection moulding machines. The renewal of the plastic mould industry, technological innovation has also undergone unprecedented gratifying changes. Most enterprises in Shantou area of Guangdong Province have introduced the latest computer automated die processing technology from Germany, France, Italy and Taiwan Province of China, which has greatly improved the technical performance and quality of the die.
Although China's plastic machinery has developed rapidly and produced many kinds of products, it can basically supply the general technical equipment needed for domestic plastic raw material processing and plastic products processing and moulding, and individual products have also entered the forefront of the world, compared with developed industrial countries such as Germany, Japan and Italy, China's plastic machinery still has a certain gap, mainly manifested in fewer varieties, high energy consumption and control. Low level, unstable performance and so on.
At present, China's plastic machinery products are mainly concentrated in general small and medium-sized equipment, with low technology content. In the 1980s and 1990s, the supply of low-grade products exceeded the demand, the manufacturing capacity of machinery was excessive, and the efficiency of enterprises decreased. Some varieties, especially super-precision large-scale and high-grade products, are still blank and still need to be imported. According to statistics in 2001, China imported plastic machinery using foreign exchange of 1.120 billion US dollars, while export plastic machinery earned foreign exchange of only 130 million US dollars, imports far greater than exports.
After China's accession to the World Economic and Trade Organization (WTO), the foreign machinery manufacturing industry has accelerated its transfer to China. Some famous plastic machinery enterprises in the world, such as German Deutsche Mark, Krupp, Bardenfield and Sumitomo Heavy Industries of Japan, have successively "settled" in China, and some have further established technology centers. The entry of foreign plastic machinery manufacturers has brought vitality to the development of China's plastic machinery industry, and at the same time, it has also made China's plastic machinery manufacturing enterprises full of opportunities and challenges.