In the entire manufacturing industry, there was a default iron law: high-end machine tools depended on Germany and Japan. We could only purchase them at high prices and were in a passive and constrained situation.
However, in the past two years, the Japanese machine tool industry has fallen into collective anxiety. In overseas factories in Southeast Asia and Central Asia, a large number of expensive Japanese machine tools are being replaced in batches by hundreds of thousands of domestic equipment made in Tengzhou, Shandong.
No one would have thought that it would be not a first-tier industrial city that would overturn the global machine tool landscape in half a century and break the monopoly advantages of Germany and Japan, but an unknown county-level town in Shandong – Tengzhou, which quietly completed the overtaking of Chinese manufacturing.
Japan’s industry authority “Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun” now contains early warnings of a sense of crisis.
Japan’s total machine tool exports fell to 761.7 billion yen in 2024, a year-on-year decrease of 8.3%, marking two consecutive years of negative growth.
The European market plummeted by 22%, and North America fell by 12.7%. The traditional advantageous market continues to lose ground, and the myth of Japan’s “industrial mother machine” is quickly fading.
At the same time, the German Machinery Manufacturers Association publicly confirmed the historic change: China’s machine tool exports will surge by 18% in 2025, with a global share of 21.6%, officially surpassing Germany’s 16.7%, and becoming the world’s largest machine tool exporter.
From a long period of catching up, to struggling to follow, to overtaking and reaching the top, in just a few years, the underlying supply chain of global manufacturing has been completely rewritten.
Machine tools are called industrial mother machines, and they are the foundation of all manufacturing industries.
The upper limit of accuracy of all industrial products such as mobile phone casings, automotive precision parts, and aircraft engine blades is all determined by machine tools.
In the past fifty years, Germany and Japan have firmly controlled the lifeblood of global manufacturing with machine tools, and we have been locked in the low-end processing track for a long time.
The core force that truly opened the technological gap and leveraged the overall turnaround came from Tengzhou, Shandong, which is the hometown of Lu Ban and Mozi.
Domestic machine tools had a difficult start decades ago. They relied on the Soviet aid to build the “Arhat” machine tool factory as a foundation. In 1958, the first CNC milling machine was trial-produced.
However, due to long-term technology blockade and R&D gaps, it eventually fell into the embarrassing situation of “big but not strong, high-end blank”.
After the reform and opening up, the shortcomings were completely exposed: the low-end was self-sufficient, the mid-range was barely able to make do, and the high-end was completely dependent on imports.
In particular, the five-axis linkage CNC machine tools that are urgently needed by the military industry and aviation are strictly blocked by the Western “Wassenaar Agreement” and the core technology will never be leaked.
In the most difficult years, we could build machine tool casings, but could not install the core systems, and were hampered by foreign companies throughout the process.
The core soul of machine tools lies in the CNC system, which is equivalent to the brain of the equipment and determines accuracy, stability and service life.
For decades, the global high-end system market has been absolutely monopolized by the duopoly of Japan’s Fanuc and Germany’s Siemens.
In the vast majority of domestic processing plants, the core components of machine tools are all made from overseas products, with no substitution and no bargaining power.
At that time, a five-axis machine tool equipped with the FANUC system was priced from hundreds of thousands to millions, and the Japanese rules were overbearing and harsh.
The system is not sold separately and must be packaged as a whole. Domestic companies are at the bottom of the queue and there is no choice in the whole process.
At that time, Tengzhou’s machine tool industry was at the bottom of the industry. It could only produce simple drilling machines worth a few thousand yuan, with small profits and no ability to develop.
But now Tengzhou has gathered nearly 400 machine tool and supporting companies, with an annual output of 200,000 sets of equipment, and the annual industrial output value has exceeded 26 billion.
The domestic market share of small and medium-sized CNC drilling and milling machines exceeds 80%. One city monopolizes 80% of the national market segments and completely controls the small and medium-sized machine tool track.
In 2009, it was named “China’s Small and Medium-sized Machine Tool Capital”. The local area also plans to hit the “World’s Small and Medium-sized Machine Tool Capital” in 2028, achieving an industry scale of 50 billion and an export share of 30%.
Weida Heavy Industry, the leader in Tengzhou, is taking the most practical and hard-core domestic breakthrough route.
Starting from basic ordinary machine tools, iterating on CNC equipment, tackling machining centers, and striving for the most difficult five-axis linkage core technology.
Its self-developed gantry machining center has won the industry’s top “Spring Swallow Award” for three consecutive years. Its self-developed five-axis machine tools have been exported to more than 70 countries around the world in batches, and have been fully launched in European, American, Southeast Asian and African markets.
The supporting rate of Tengzhou’s local industrial chain exceeds 80%, and casting, assembly, debugging, and shipment are completed in a one-stop closed loop in the city.
Compared with the monthly delivery cycle of German and Japanese brands, Tengzhou equipment is delivered on a weekly basis, with on-call after-sales service, and its efficiency surpasses that of established overseas companies.
Equipment under the same operating conditions is priced at 400,000 to 500,000 yuan in Japan, but only 100,000 yuan in Tengzhou. The price-performance ratio directly breaks through the premium bubble of overseas brands.
As the domestic new energy industry chain goes overseas on a large scale, Tengzhou Machine Tools goes overseas simultaneously and is bound to the vehicle supply chain.
It not only sells a single piece of equipment, but also simultaneously outputs a complete set of solutions for parts, maintenance and guarantee, and digital production.
Traditional Japanese companies stick to the hardware sales model and lag behind in services. In the new era of industrial chain competition, their advantages continue to collapse.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has long been deeply aware of the crisis. In 2025, it issued an emergency industrial transformation plan and was forced to face the reality that its hegemony was loosening and its track was being replaced.
We must also be aware that counterattacks are something to be proud of, but the high-end gap still exists objectively.
High-end CNC systems, high-precision electric spindles, and extreme working condition stability are still the moats behind decades of technological accumulation in Germany and Japan.
There is still clear room for iteration in terms of the continuous trouble-free operation time of domestic equipment and the accuracy of multi-axis linkage algorithms.
At the same time, most companies in Tengzhou are still concentrated in the middle and low-end tracks, and the problems of homogeneous involution, low profits, and weak R&D have not yet been completely solved.
There are no shortcuts to high-end breakthroughs. We can only rely on continuous investment, long-term accumulation, steady iteration, and bit by bit the hard technical bones.
From being stuck to ranking first in global exports, from low-end involution to going overseas in batches to replace imports, Tengzhou’s counterattack is the epitome of domestic manufacturing.
Nowadays, local industries have driven a large number of technical jobs back, and talents in numerical control, programming, and debugging have found high-paying employment at home.
It not only supports the country’s equipment manufacturing industry, but also protects the stable livelihood of ordinary families.
The rise of China’s machine tools has never been due to luck. It is the result of decades of hard work by countless factories, technicians and enterprises.
From catching up to running parallel, we will eventually take the lead in the future, and the right to speak of the industrial mother machine is firmly returning to our own hands.
