Key Materials and Processing Equipment Rely on Import?-1

Recently, the vice-minister of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China and head of National Manufacturing Leading Group Office, Xin Guobin declares that the development of manufacturing industry has achieved great success since the reform and opening up of China more than 40 years ago in the 2018 National Manufacturing Expert Forum. 

China's manufacturing value added ranks first in the world for many years, and high-tech manufacturing industry accounts for more than 12% of above-scale industrial added value. Besides, we have made a lot of major breakthroughs in different fields, such as manned space flight and high-speed railway. Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing blockchain and other technologies are emerging constantly, and a batch of technology enters into the first phalanx of the international market. However, we should clearly realize that the innovation ability of manufacturing industry is weak and highly dependent on import. A lot of industries are still at the middle and low end of global industry chain and value chain. 

According to the research result of more than 130 key basic materials in the industrial field published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, it shows that 32% of key materials are still blank in China, and 52% of key materials rely on imports. The 95% of high-end specialized chips of most computers and server general-purpose processors, more than 70% of smart terminal processors and most memory chips are dependent on imports. In the field of equipment manufacturing, more than 95% of manufacturing and testing equipment for high-end computer numerical control machine tools, high-end equipment, launch vehicles, large aircraft, aero engines, automobiles and other fine machining production line of key parts relies on imports. For instance, in 2017, the shipment of liquid crystal display panel in mainland China reached 33% of the world, and the industry scale was about 100 billion US dollars, ranking first in the world. But the key material of the panel which is described as “the bone of the LCD screen, the foot of the chip” - spacer microspheres and conductive gold balls, can only be provided by one or two companies in Japan around the world. We are hardly able to produce these materials. It looks like being strangled by other people.

Generally, we think that our manufacturing industry has already become a great power in the world, and a lot of products rank first around the world. In fact, we are still far from being a manufacturing power, and have decades of gaps with developed countries, especially in key areas of national economy and people’s livelihood and some advanced manufacturing and materials.

I have long been engaged in the production of tungsten, molybdenum and rare earth industry and the development of the international market. I have been observing the important materials with resource advantages in China for a long time, such as tungsten industry. China's resource reserves account for nearly 70% of the global resources, and the production and supply of tungsten products take up more than 85% of the world's total amount. However, most of our tungsten products which are processed and exported are the primary products of tungsten, such as various types of tungstate. In some domestic manufacturers, the production amount or capacity of a tungsten oxide in an industry is equivalent to the total amount of tungsten industry in developed countries. The problem is that the technical content of tungsten production and the added value of our products are too low.

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