In recent years, plastic injection molding industry has developed rapidly in China, and it is followed by increasingly fierce market competition. After joining WTO, foreign plastic moulding factory enter domestic market. It is essential to stand out in fierce competition, develop mold standard parts and implement specialized production of molds.
As one of pillar industries of China’s light industry, plastics industry has maintained a growth rate of more than 10% in recent years. In plastics industry, plastics hardware market is very active, becoming a new consumer hotspot and a new economic growth point. Plastic hardware molding market has a promising future, but it is far from the foreign technology level.
At present, China’s molds need to break through bottleneck restricting development of mold industry. Because with rapid development of China’s machinery, automobiles, home appliances and building materials, plastic injection molding account for about 30% of entire mold industry. However, due to complex shape of plastic mold parts, there are high requirements for their design level. Therefore, technical level of plastic injection molding test results must be innovative and keep up with trend of times, otherwise development of plastic injection molding will be restricted.
Industry believes that plastic moulding factory must improve their technology in order to break through bottleneck. At the State Council meeting on the 26th, Prime Minister also said that today’s technological revolution plays a crucial role in economic development and economic upgrading. It advocates mass entrepreneurship for innovation and it is also an innovative means to promote entrepreneurship.
Mold trade deficit has increased year by year
Although growth rate of mold exports in recent years is greater than increase in imports, absolute increase is still greater than that of imports, resulting in a year-on-year increase in trade deficit of molds. This situation has improved in 2006 and deficit has decreased slightly. There are two main reasons for increase in foreign trade deficit of mold: First, sustained rapid development of national economy, especially rapid development of automobile industry has brought about a strong demand for molds. Some high-end molds cannot be produced domestically, so they have to import them; but there are still some molds can be produced domestically and imported. This is related to China’s current tariff policy and project approval system. Second, incentive for mold exports is not enough. Nowadays, like other electromechanical products, export tax rebate rate is only 13%, but not as high as 17%.
From development forecast report of China’s plastic injection molding industry, it is understood that plastic mold maker should focus on development of large, precise, complex and long-life molds with high technical content, and vigorously develop international market and develop export molds. With rapid development of China’s plastics industry, especially engineering plastics, it is foreseeable that development speed of China’s plastic injection molding will continue to be higher than overall development speed of mold industry, and annual growth rate will remain at around 20% in the next few years.
New trends in plastic injection molding development
In four elements of mold quality, delivery cycle, price and service, more and more users have placed delivery cycle in the first place. It has become a trend to require plastic mold maker to deliver as soon as possible. It is an effective means for enterprises to improve their adaptability, technical level, equipment level, management level and efficiency.
Vigorously improve development capability including molding design, push development work forward as much as possible, until it is involved in product development of mold users, and even develop before explicit user object, and become passive. At present, TV and display housings, air conditioner housings, motorcycle plastic parts, etc. have adopted this method, and development of mobile phone and telephone molds has also begun. This kind of practice has broken passive situation that mold factory can only wait for contract to be able to molding design according to user’s requirements.
With improvement of molding design and processing level of plastic moulding factory, manufacture of molds has changed from relying on skills of fitters to relying mainly on technology. This is not only a change in production means, but also a change in production methods and an increase in ideas. This trend has led to continuous improvement of standardization of mold, higher precision of mold, shorter production cycle, lower proportion of fitter, which has finally promoted overall improvement of level of mold industry. China’s mold industry has more than 10 state-level high-tech plastic moulding factory, about 200 provincial and municipal high-tech plastic moulding factory. In line with this trend, it is inevitable that main backbone of production molds will gradually change from skilled talents to technical talents. Of course, at present and for a long time, skilled talents are still very important, because plastic injection molding is difficult to completely get rid of dependence on skills.
Plastic moulding factory and their mold production are rapidly developing into information technology. In information society, as a high-level modern plastic mold maker, the application of CAD/CAM alone is far from enough. At present, many enterprises have adopted CAE, CAT, PDM, CAPP, KBE, KBS, RE, CIMS, ERP and other advanced manufacturing technologies and virtual network technologies, which are all manifestations of informationization. The trend towards development of information technology has become an industry consensus.
