WTO Brings Opportunity to Instrumentation Industry

Since China's accession to the WTO, the Chinese economy has faced opportunities and challenges. Then what kind of opportunities will this bring to China's instrumentation industry? Those who care about the development of the instrumentation industry will want to seize this opportunity to move forward.

Recalling the distance traveled by China's instrumentation industry for more than 20 years, it will be an inspiration to learn how to seize the opportunity after the WTO accession, and it will be a lesson to be learned from. If it is said that before the accumulation of power, learn lessons, then after joining the WTO, China's instrumentation industry is no doubt officially standing on the starting line, to prepare for the final sprint. We believe that as long as we make full use of favorable conditions in all aspects, China's instrumentation industry will be the final winner in this race.

Instruments and meters originally referred to precision equipment used to measure water, gas, electricity, oil pressure, flow, temperature, including thousands of varieties of products. In the last 20 years of the last century, with the increasing development of microelectronics and communication technologies, high-tech test and measurement instruments have become an integral part of the current instrumentation industry. According to the data, the domestic instrumentation industry not only completed the layout, construction, production and development in the early 1980s, but also basically satisfied the needs of various domestic parties. However, with the reform and opening up, foreign instrument products began to flood into the Chinese market, opening up a new stage of competition and cooperation between Chinese and foreign companies.

However, the results of Sino-foreign cooperation over the past decade have not been satisfactory. Recently, relevant experts in China's instrumentation industry pointed out that currently most of China's instrumentation products are in the middle and low grades, and the current production situation is not satisfactory: high-end, large-scale equipment and equipment are almost all dependent on imports, mid-range products and many key components, and foreign companies occupy the domestic market. More than 60% share. Domestic analytical instruments account for less than three-thousandths of the global market share. The gap between domestic instrumentation and imported products is significant. What are the reasons?

The overall quality of domestic enterprises' products lags behind that of imported products. The lack of policy protection also contributes to the uniqueness of imported products in the domestic market. The deeper internal reason is that since the early 1990s, in the fields of high-tech automated instrumentation and systems, scientific test instruments, and sensor components, the major players in competition have been the introduction and joint venture products.

In the process of introduction, joint venture, and localization, domestic companies lacked research on the key technologies of products, they could not independently upgrade their products, and the phenomenon of repeated introduction was serious. After China's accession to the WTO, tariffs on instrumentation will be further lowered, and foreign companies will accelerate their entry into the Chinese market. In order to win the competition with foreign-funded enterprises, Chinese companies must take a good "technical pass" and adjust their own technological progress.

With the general reduction of tariffs after China's accession to the WTO, various electronic components and basic materials required by the instrumentation and meter industry may face greater choices in terms of varieties and prices, and reduce the cost of products for domestic enterprises. The renewal and replacement, as well as participation in the fair competition in the entire market, have a positive impact; it also helps in attracting foreign investment and foreign technical cooperation. As far as the middle and low-end products whose export has formed scale and advantages are concerned, “entering the WTO” is a good time to expand the international market.