China is not only the world's largest producer of machine tools, but also the world's largest consumer of machine tools. In 2019, the total global consumption of machine tools was 82.1 billion US dollars, and China reached 155.528 billion yuan, accounting for 27% of global consumption.

As the second largest machine tool consumer, the United States only consumes 60 billion yuan. Among many countries, the United States mainly imports machine tools from China, while China imports machine tools from Japanese and European enterprises. The average import price in the first 11 months of last year was 267500 dollars/set.

Therefore, there are many comments online that believe that China still relies on importing Japanese machine tools in the machine tool industry. Is this really the case?

In fact, in the field of mid to low end machine tools, China has already surpassed Japan, but in terms of high-end machine tools, China is indeed not as good as Japanese and European companies. Therefore, some people loudly advocate that without Japan's high-end machine tools, China cannot produce large machinery!

Firstly, we need to use heavy-duty CNC machine tools until the manufacturing of weapons such as aircraft carriers. Like these heavy-duty CNC machine tools, China has been domestically produced for many years and their performance is very stable. As a military professional tool, China cannot choose Japanese civilian CNC machine tools. Therefore, except for aircraft carriers, China's key high-end manufacturing products all use domestically produced machine tools.

Since that's the case, why did Japanese civilian machine tools surpass domestic machine tools a few years ago?

This is because in earlier years, although domestic machine tools were cheap, their performance was not very stable. We all know that German made machine tools perform exceptionally well in terms of machine tool performance, but they are expensive and many companies cannot afford them.

Compared to German made machine tools and domestic machine tools, Japan is in the middle position. It can not only make up for the stability shortcomings of domestic machine tools, but also has a relatively reasonable price, which is much cheaper than German made machine tools.

Based on import and export data from the first 11 months of 2020, 906 CNC machine tools were imported from Germany, with a total import value of 563 million US dollars and an average price of 621400 US dollars per machine; Japan exports 2067 CNC machine tools to China, with a total import price of 539 million US dollars and an average price of 260800 US dollars.

The lowest average import price is machine tools in Taiwan Province Province of China. The total import volume is 257 million US dollars, and the total import quantity is 2293 sets, which is equivalent to the price of 112100 US dollars per set.

For this reason, except for some companies that require high machining accuracy to purchase German machine tools, most companies will compromise and choose to purchase Japanese machine tools, which has also led to Japanese machine tools monopolizing the Chinese machine tool market for a long time.

What we all know is that in the high-end industrial field, countries like Switzerland, Italy, and Germany have a century long history of industrial development and have accumulated a large number of experienced and skilled workers, which is also the main reason why Europe can firmly occupy the dominant position in the high-end industrial field.

On the contrary, China started several decades later than European and American countries. China's real efforts to develop high-end industries began from the 863 Program. So, whether in terms of historical experience or financial investment, China and other countries are completely different from the starting line.

However, despite the advanced technology in Europe and America