The growth rate of the machinery industry has stabilized at a low level. Under the influence of the reverse pressure mechanism, the industry’s industrial structure continues to advance. The outstanding highlights are that the external expansion has cooled down, innovation has become increasingly hot, and the structure is evolving in the expected direction.
First, investment growth has slowed, and external expansion has cooled. This year, fixed asset investment in the machinery industry has continued its downward trend from the previous year. Since March, the cumulative year-on-year growth rate has continued to decline. Furthermore, in the first half of the year, growth continued to lag behind the overall social and manufacturing levels, reversing its previous trend of significantly outstripping fixed asset investment growth in the entire economy and the entire manufacturing sector. In the first half of the year, cumulative fixed asset investment reached 1.72 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 14.09%. This represents a year-on-year decline of over 14 percentage points, and is 6.01 and 3.01 percentage points lower than the growth rates of fixed asset investment in the entire economy and the entire manufacturing sector during the same period. This indicates that the industry’s external expansion has clearly cooled.
Secondly, innovation-driven development is becoming the preferred approach for a growing number of companies. Faced with the severe challenge of declining demand for traditional products, the industry has seen a surge in research and development of new products and processes since the beginning of this year. More and more companies are committed to expanding markets through new products, reducing costs through technological advancement, and increasing profitability through import substitution, cultivating new growth points through innovation-driven development.
To seize the initiative in product innovation and enhance core competitiveness, despite the challenges faced by most companies in production and operations, the industry continues to invest heavily in R&D. More and more leading companies are seizing opportunities to “go global” and attract talent while also increasing investment in their own R&D laboratories, striving to build R&D and testing capabilities that are unmatched by their peers.
Secondly, private enterprises have shown greater dynamism in responding to market fluctuations. Weak market demand has posed challenges to traditional products and production models in the machinery industry. In this competitive market, private enterprises have demonstrated greater dynamism.
Driven by market pressure, more and more machinery companies are striving to promote structural adjustment and transformation and upgrading. Positive factors in the industry’s economic performance are growing. Therefore, we believe that the machinery industry’s performance is expected to maintain stable development in the second half of the year. The annual growth rate of the machinery industry is expected to be slightly higher than that of 2012, with production and sales growth of around 12%, profit growth of around 8%, and export volume roughly the same as last year.