Opportunity and Challenge, What Can We Rely upon to Win the Market?

In recent eight years, the development of packaging equipment manufacturing in China has been soaring with the annual growth rate of 18%. According to forecast by related organization, from 2011 to 2015, the gross output value of food and packaging machinery is expected to exceed 600 billion Yuan.

The largest consumers of packaging machinery are food, beverage, electronics, daily-use chemicals and pharmaceutical industry. In recent years, a lot of manufacturers have invested capital in technical transformation of packaging equipment and manufacturing technology innovation, which has brought broad commercial opportunities to the packaging equipment market.

Compared with Chinas machinery industry, packaging machinery is 32 years younger, and it is a young and sunrise industry, with remarkable development, yet there are a lot of faults:

First, low production efficiency, high energy consumption, unstable performance and little application of automation control technology. For regional distribution, there are more manufacturers in the south and fewer in the north, and over 95% of enterprises are distributed in Southern cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Jiangsu, and most of them are Taiwan-funded enterprises. In the north, only one or two small and medium-sized enterprises, such as Shijiazhuang Kechuang Food Technology Co., Ltd., have automation research and development in this aspect. To our delight, due to unique features such as low energy consumption, high efficiency and stable performance, the independently developed automatic trapping label machine, secondary sterilizer as well as shrinking label machine and conveyor have been well recognized within the industry and the technical level is leading in the industry.
 
Second, more single machines and fewer package units; more host machines and fewer auxiliary machines; more general models and fewer models for specific requirement and specific material processing. Within the industry, about 25% of enterprises have kept on manufacturing the easy-to-manufacture machinery products with low production cost and backward technological level. The market is full of this kind of products, and this not only causes great waste of resources, but also hinders the updating and upgrading of products and innovation in the industry. The head of Shijiazhuang Kechuang Food Technology Co., Ltd. said that, to control production cost and promote production efficiency, manufacturers have increasing requirement and expectation on packaging equipment, and corollary, automatic and unmanned packaging machinery equipment is the inevitable trend in the development of packaging equipment manufacturing. The mode of designing production line and developing corollary equipment according to actual production corresponds to the breakthrough in industrial core technology and key technology defined by the national Twelfth Five-year Plan.

Third, the enterprises have small size and insufficient fund for research, development and innovation. Most of Chinese packaging manufacturers are small and medium-sized enterprises, and their production is mainly imitation and mapping, with some home-made improvement. Most enterprises have little or no investment into research, development and innovation due to capital constrain and focus on production instead of research, development and innovation, consequently, they cannot ensure the development of new products and new technologies and cannot keep in step with market demand to provide products, which causes 15% of the enterprises to switch to other production or close down each year, and 15% new players will enter the industry, with great instability.

According to the report on http://www.mofcom.gov.cn/, the recent investigation by VDMA shows that the industry has to quicken its pace of exploitation in Chinese market. German packaging machinery package unit has high efficiency and high degree of automation, which poses severe challenges to us when we strengthen and expand this industry and strive for larger market share.