Since 2000, with the strong guidance and support of national policies, the concentration of China's machine tool industry has steadily increased, and market share has gradually shifted towards a few advantageous enterprises. The market structure has also transformed from a perfectly competitive market structure to a monopolistic competitive market structure. The trend of increasing production concentration in the machine tool industry will accelerate China's transformation into a world machine tool powerhouse.

1、 The integration of the machine tool industry is imperative

The machine tool industry has always been a labor-intensive, capital intensive, and technology intensive industry, with high barriers to entry. Even if the companies entering cannot reach a certain scale, it is difficult to generate profits. Large enterprises can reduce costs through large-scale procurement and production, generate synergies through coordinating different subsidiaries or business units, and establish a global sales team to cover products in different regions and markets. Therefore, the machine tool industry has a characteristic of the larger being always strong. The future focus of the machine tool industry will mainly be on integration, mainly in the form of regional integration, industrial chain integration, and strategic integration. Among them, regional integration refers to the integration of machine tool enterprises in similar regions, which can concentrate on utilizing policy and management advantages to generate good synergies; Industry chain integration refers to the combination of machine tool enterprises with a single function, or the combination of machine tool production enterprises and key component suppliers, in order to gather the strengths of each company and solve a technical bottleneck faced by composite machine tools; Strategic integration is the introduction of strategic partners such as automotive and military industries to more accurately grasp downstream demand, develop targeted products, and reduce unnecessary losses in the research and development process. The reason why the future focus of the machine tool industry is on integration is because the current development is not optimistic. Only through a new round of integration can the machine tool industry further develop.

The metal cutting machine tool industry is the largest and most prominent sector in the machine tool industry in terms of economic scale. Therefore, by studying the development of metal machine tools, we can gain insight into the overall operation of the machine tool industry. Data shows that from 2011 to 2016, the sales revenue of China's metal machine tool industry fluctuated within the range of 150-180 billion yuan, and the growth was not significant; The fluctuation range of total profit is also significant. In 2011, the total profit of metal machine tools was 9.255 billion yuan, which decreased to 5.296 billion yuan in 2013 and rebounded slightly in 2014, with a total profit of 7.635 billion yuan. In 2016, the total profit was 7.282 billion yuan, an increase of 21.54% compared to 2015, but there is still a gap from the total profit in 2014. In addition, there is a significant gap in the CNC production rate of China's machine tool industry compared to developed countries. Taking the numerical control rate of metal cutting machine tools as an example, it increased from 22% in 2000 to 61.42% in 2015, and the numerical control rate was about 64.13% in 2016. However, the numerical control rate of numerical control machine tools in developed countries is between 80% and 90%, and there is still a lot of room for improvement.

2、 Development Trends in the Machine Tool Industry

Based on the above analysis, there will be two major trends in the machine tool industry in the future. One is the demand for high-precision and intelligent CNC machine tools; Secondly, the level of CNC machine tool technology needs to make significant progress.

In recent years, the market demand for domestic machine tool industry has gradually shifted towards mid to high end machine tools. In the context of sluggish market growth, the market share of high-precision and intelligent CNC machine tools has increased, and the proportion of CNC machine tools in total machine tool consumption has risen to over 60%. CNC machine tools are developing towards high-speed, precision, intelligence, and green direction. However, in contrast, high-end machine tools in China still rely mainly on imports, and the market share of domestic brands is still very low. It can be said that high-precision intelligent CNC machine tools will be the development trend of the machine tool industry.

The overall technological development capability and foundation of China's CNC machine tool industry are weak, and the degree of application of information technology is not high. At present, the industry still mainly relies on the introduction of foreign technology, lacks its own core technology, and has a high dependence on foreign technology. The digestion of imported technology still remains at the level of mastering existing technology and improving localization rate, and has not risen to the height of forming independent product development and technological innovation capabilities. High performance practical CNC machine tools with characteristics such as high precision, high speed, high efficiency, composite functions, and multi axis linkage basically still rely on imports. In the face of market changes, the technological level of domestic CNC machine tools still needs to make significant progress.