The automotive mold market is booming and competition is fierce

[China Plastics Machinery Network News] Automotive mold is an important basic process equipment for the automotive industry. In automobile production, more than 90% of parts and components need to rely on mold forming, and 60% to 70% of metal parts need plastic forming. With the rapid development of the mold market, the competition between mold companies and products has become increasingly fierce. On the one hand, the mold industry has accelerated the convergence with the domestic and foreign markets. On the other hand, due to the non-standard market order, it has brought disorder between mold companies. competition.

It is understood that the production of an ordinary car requires about 1500 sets of molds, of which about 1,000 sets of stamping die. In the development of new models, 90% of the workload has been carried out around the changes in the body profile. About 60% of new vehicle development costs are used for the development of bodywork and stamping processes and equipment. About 40% of the vehicle manufacturing cost is the cost of the body stamping and its assembly.

At present, the competition in China's middle and high-end mold market is mainly the competition between China's key backbone mold enterprises and “three foreign-funded” enterprises. The competition in middle and low-end mold market is mainly the competition among private enterprises. "The growth of international mold capital in China has brought capital, technology and advanced equipment, but it has also put pressure on China's domestic mold manufacturing companies and has intensified market competition."

Luo Baihui, Secretary-General of the International Model Association, said that compared to the country's backward mold manufacturing level, the multinational mold group not only possesses abundant funds, advanced technology, high-quality equipment and successful mold experience accumulated over many years, but also employs a relatively low labor force in China. The cost advantage of resources is ahead of many domestic mold enterprises in the domestic mold market competition.

However, due to the limitations of private enterprises, mold price wars are common in the mid-to-low-end mold market competition. Many mold companies are willing to process molds at prices below cost in order to receive orders, and low prices bring low quality. It has aggravated the disorderly competition in the mold market and the mold material market, and has seriously affected the survival of some mold companies. This point deserves our attention in the industry.

At present, China is basically self-sufficient in molds such as trucks, light vehicles, and mini-vans, and can produce some car cover molds. However, most of the molds for cars still need to be imported, mainly body part cover molds and interior part molds. The annual import amount is more than 100 million US dollars. In the automotive mold manufacturing process, most of the key equipment such as large-scale machining centers are used. Basically, they are integrated with advanced foreign processing technologies. Several large automobile mold enterprises can, in principle, make complete sets of tooling for automobile molds, such as FAW Mold. After the technical transformation, the number of machining centers has reached 36, and there are also more than 25 BYD mold companies in Beijing. Dongfeng Automobile molds, Tian steam molds and Chengfei molds all have certain processing strength.

At present, China's automotive mold design and manufacturing process technology is backward, the most prominent performance is the poor ability of the software's secondary development. In recent years, China has introduced many foreign advanced mold design software. However, the data and materials of various aspects of China's automotive products are different from those of foreign countries. We must combine the national conditions of China with the introduction of software to conduct secondary development of software in order to design and manufacture molds that meet market requirements.