Qingdao Textile Machinery Industry: Standing at the “Toutier” of Textile Iteration
On the one hand, there is an overwhelming number of market orders, but on the other hand, the rising costs caused by the rising prices of bulk commodities must be achieved in such a market environment. Greater space for development will test the company’s ability to transform and upgrade.
In Qingdao, Textile machinery is one of the traditional advantageous industries and has “hidden champions” in multiple subdivisions. Wangtai Town in Jiaonan is the only distinctiveindustrial cluster in China that has been awarded the title of “Famous Textile Machinery Town in China” by the ChinaTextile IndustryAssociation. font> town has more than 1,600 textile machinery manufacturers of various types and is the largest shuttleless loom and water-jet loom production base in the country.
Facing the industry trend of coexisting opportunities and challenges, Qingdao textile machinery companies have significantly accelerated the pace of transformation and upgrading, continued to increase efforts in product innovation, digital transformation, etc., and accelerated the improvement of their own strength.
Orders are overwhelming: “Happiness and troubles”
Either busy receiving customers who keep coming from all over the world, or rushing to visit customers, since entering 2021, the bosses of Qingdao textile machinery companies have been busy. At Qingdao Haijia Machinery in Wangtai Town, the one-hour interview that was finally squeezed out had to be interrupted three times to deal with matters related to visitors and orders.
“The revenue in the first half of the year has exceeded that of last year, and it is expected that this year’s revenue will double that of 2019.” Liu Jingran, general manager of Haijia Machinery, told reporters. Haijia Machinery’s main product is water-jet looms, and its market share has ranked first in the world for many years. Since the epidemic stabilized in the second half of last year, the continued rise in domestic market demand has brought new opportunities to the company. One of the major customers placed an order for 20,000 units at once, equivalent to Haijia’s two-year production capacity.
Similar stories are also happening in other textile machinery companies in Qingdao. Qingdao Hongda Textile Machinery, which specializes in spinning machinery such as blowroom-carding machines and automatic winders, has already scheduled orders for June next year. Its revenue in the first half of the year increased by 40% compared with the same period last year. Wang Lixia, general manager of the company, told reporters that domestic orders have contributed a lot. A new customer order from the Shenzhen investment industry accounts for 1/10 of the company’s annual equipment output.
Why is the market so hot all of a sudden? Is it caused by the resurgence of textile and clothing orders under the impact of the epidemic? During the interview, the reporter learned that the “uncertainty” factor of the epidemic only accounts for a small proportion. This round of huge market demand is more a general trend of the transformation and upgrading of the domestic textile and apparel industry.
At present, China is still one of the world’s most important textile and apparel exporters countries. Taking cotton spinning as an example, China’s production capacity still accounts for about 50% of the global scale. In the past two years, a large number of domestic textile machinery has reached a period of upgrading, creating a huge market space. At the same time, the transfer of domestic textile and apparel production capacity to overseas markets such as Southeast Asia is slowing down. “On the one hand, it is the impact of the epidemic on production in Southeast Asia and other places. On the other hand, the most critical reason is that the relatively mid-to-high-end domestic production capacity will still be difficult to replace for a long time. Some fabrics are woven in Southeast Asia. The cost is higher than buying in China, and the advantages of domestic enterprises in cost, quality control and other aspects are still expanding. As a result, the gap has not narrowed, but may even increase. It’s in Lada,” Liu Jingran said. The major customer who brought an order for 20,000 units to Haijia is a cross-border player from the upstream of the chemical fiber industry, expanding from the original production of chemical fiber raw materials to a full industrial chain layout from raw materials to weaving. Obviously, under such a layout, the competitiveness of end products will no longer depend on the level of labor costs.
Although market demand is strong and orders are full, companies also face considerable challenges if they want to “increase revenue” and “increase profits” at the same time. The continued rise in commodity prices under the influence of the epidemic has caused quite a headache for enterprises. However, competition from domestic and foreign peers also prevents textile machinery enterprises from easily passing on costs to users. “Textile machinery requires steel, iron, copper, aluminum, etc. The cost of these raw materials has increased by 15% compared with the past, but we only ask customers to bear half of it, and the other half is absorbed by themselves.” Wang Bing, general manager of Qingdao Shengdelong Machinery, said.
Refine “high-end” and advance into “no man’s land”
The more complex market environment has put forward higher requirements for the competitiveness of textile machinery companies. Qingdao companies are working hard on product development and innovation while rushing for orders, accelerating the pace of high-end products, and seizing market opportunities in this round of textile equipment upgrades with products that are of higher quality and ahead of their peers.
With a history of more than 100 years, Qingdao Hongda Textile Machinery has always been an innovative leader in the field of spinning machinery. Since the 1980s, the independent research and development of automatic winding machines through introduction, digestion, and reabsorption has broken the monopoly of foreign companies. This year, Hongda Textile Machinery has increased its R&D investment compared with last year. The R&D investment intensity has increased from 4% to 5%, which is equivalent to an increase of 7 million to 8 million yuan in investment. “In addition to parts accuracy, productionWe have been continuously improving and improving these aspects of product structure. The intelligentization of products and the ability to meet customers’ personalized production are two key directions. “Introduced by Wang Lixia.
If companies can also learn from the products of foreign counterparts in terms of parts and product structure, then the latter two areas of effort are “no man’s land” where there is almost no ready-made experience to learn from. After decades of development, China’s textile machinery has basically achieved the goal of running alongside the industry. In the domestic market, the market share of domestic textile machinery has reached 80%. Therefore, while the textile and garment industry has entered the era of intelligence, greenness and personalization, my country’s textile machinery enterprises have also entered the stage of independent exploration.
For example, in terms of intelligence, Qingdao Hongda Textile Machinery has equipped the automatic winding machine with a spinning quality tracking system, a single-spindle intelligent tube supply system, a single-spindle intelligent alarm system, etc., which has improved production efficiency and yarn quality. Faced with the needs of textile enterprises for multiple varieties and reduced equipment investment, the standard blowroom and carding equipment has been upgraded so that the mixing of multiple fibers can be completed in the blowroom and carding link.
No coincidence. Qingdao Shengdelong Machinery is making similar explorations in weaving equipment – adding a self-replenishing weft function to air-jet looms. Wang Bing introduced that when a traditional loom is working, if a “broken weft” occurs, manual operation is required to “replenish the weft.” Self-replenishing the weft means replacing labor with automated and intelligent means. “None of our peers at home and abroad have yet launched mature products of this type, but we have already tried them on some products,” he said.
Accelerate “connection to the Internet” and subvert the traditional management and service paradigm
Accelerating the embrace of the industrial Internet, using new generation information technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data, and exploring more new models and new business formats have become an important direction that Qingdao textile machinery companies are targeting.
At Haijia Machinery, a brand new smart factory is under rapid construction. Although the company’s water-jet looms already occupy a leading position in market share, the company is also aware that there is still a certain gap between the comprehensive stability of its products and its Japanese counterparts.
“In the future, we will take the lead in the water-jet loom segment.” Liu Jingran said that according to Haijia Textile Machinery’s plan, while developing the domestic market, we must also accelerate the expansion of overseas emerging markets. In the future Overseas sales must account for more than 50% of the company’s total revenue within five years. This means that product R&D and innovation alone are not enough, lean management of the production and manufacturing links is also crucial. “We must use intelligent manufacturing to achieve first-class levels in the production process.” Liu Jingran said.
In fact, more and more small and medium-sized textile machinery enterprises in Qingdao have realized that the competitiveness of enterprises depends not only on factors such as the level of product technology and the cost of the supply chain, but also on the strength of enterprise management capabilities. As the market competition environment changes, the impact will become greater and greater. Management transformation relying on informatization and digital means has become inevitable.
In terms of business model innovation relying on the industrial Internet, Qingdao’s pioneering companies have begun to taste the “sweetness”. As one of the first companies in the textile machinery industry to explore the transformation from “selling products” to “selling services”, Qingdao Hongda Textile Machinery established a remote equipment operation and maintenance platform a few years ago. Since 2020, the epidemic has restricted the movement of people, and the platform has become increasingly recognized by customers. As of the first half of this year, the number of customers purchasing remote operation and maintenance platform services has doubled compared to the whole of last year.
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