Current Status of China's Automotive Mold Industry

In recent years, the structure of my country's automotive mold industry, including enterprise organizational structure, product structure, technological structure, and import/export structure, has been developing towards rationalization. To upgrade and improve equipment levels, automotive mold design and processing enterprises need to import billions of yuan worth of equipment annually.

Investment in innovation and development remains insufficient. The improvement of comprehensive R&D capabilities within the mold industry has seriously lagged behind the improvement of production capacity. The main problems are reflected in weak innovation capabilities; low overall efficiency; low levels of specialization, standardization, and commercialization; poor collaboration; outdated mold materials and related technologies; and unreasonable enterprise organizational structure, product structure, technological structure, and import/export structure. Compared with international advanced levels, the management of mold enterprises is even more backward than their technology.

According to Luo Baihui, Secretary-General of the International Mould & Hardware Plastics Industry Suppliers Association, the development trend of China's mold industry over the next decade will be: mold products will develop towards larger, more precise, more complex, more economical, and faster production; the technological content of molds will continuously improve, and the mold manufacturing cycle will continuously shorten; mold production will develop towards informatization, drawing-free production, refinement, and automation; and mold enterprises will develop towards technological integration, sophisticated equipment, branded products, information-based management, and internationalized operations.

Currently, mold processing enterprises with national output exceeding 100 million yuan are primarily concentrated in the automotive body panel mold sector.