Analysis of Development Prospects and Problems of Instruments and Meters Industry in China

In the era of human society entering the era of knowledge economy and the rapid development of information technology, instrumentation and its measurement and control technologies are increasingly used, providing a good opportunity for the rapid development of the instrumentation industry. After nearly 10 years of construction and development, China's instrumentation has initially formed a relatively complete variety of product categories, with a certain production scale and development capacity of the industrial system, becoming Asia's second largest producer of instrumentation in addition to Japan.

Instruments and meters are instruments or devices used to detect, measure, observe, and calculate various physical quantities, material compositions, and physical properties. Including vacuum leak detectors, pressure gauges, length measuring instruments, microscopes, multipliers, etc. Broadly speaking, instruments and meters can also have functions such as automatic control, alarm, signal transmission and data processing. For example, pneumatic control instruments used in automatic control of industrial production processes, and electric adjustment instruments, and distributed instrument control systems also belong to Instrumentation.

It is expected that this year and the future, the market prospects of China's instrumentation industry can be analyzed from the following aspects:

1, environmental protection instrumentation

Environmental protection instruments are mainly used in environmental quality monitoring and pollution source monitoring. For the specific national conditions of our country, environmental protection mainly solves two strategic and overall ecological environmental pollution problems in China's water environment and atmospheric environment. With energy saving, emission reduction and low-carbon economy, China has become a long-term national policy. The environmental monitoring instrumentation, sampling system, and environmental monitoring automation control system products for the atmosphere and water environment have potential market scale of several billion yuan to several hundred billion yuan. The demand for electric energy meters is relatively large. Market demand for electricity meters will also increase in other Southeast Asian countries and some developing countries. This will provide opportunities for China's electric energy companies to expand into foreign markets.

3, industrial automation instrument

Industrial automation instruments focus on the development of main control system devices based on fieldbus technology, as well as intelligent instruments, special and special automation instruments. From the market demand, the demand for China's industrial automation market is growing. According to the forecast of the China Instrument and Meter Association, by the end of the 11th Five-Year Plan period, the demand for industrial automation market will exceed 100 billion yuan.

On the other hand, as the country's concern for people's livelihood has greatly increased, some needs related to the people's livelihood have also been mentioned on the agenda. Such as food safety, detection of milk powder and cooking oil; drug safety, detection of problem vaccines; accident and climate monitoring, earthquake and tsunami detection and alarm. These dangerous events also put new requirements and market demands on instrumentation.

The development pace of the instrumentation industry is not slowed by the financial turmoil

The instrumentation industry has maintained a high level of economic operation for six consecutive years. Although the global economy is currently affected by the financial turmoil, Dongpu has slowed down in various industries. However, from the current situation, the growth rate of the instrument industry has not slowed down.

Dong Jingchen, deputy secretary-general of the China Instrument and Meter Industry Association, pointed out: 'There are two main reasons. First, the country's economy is still operating at a high level. According to past experience, if the GDP growth is above 10%, the growth rate of the instrument industry is Between 26% and 30%. Second, there is a lag period in the impact of the national macro-control on the instrument industry. Meters are often delivered late in the project. Therefore, the investment that is reduced due to macro-control policies will not have much impact on the instrument industry this year. '

Foreign instrumentation companies began to change their investment methods, which were originally based on sole proprietorship. This change is mainly reflected in two aspects. First, it has begun to focus on acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions of outstanding domestic production companies. Second, the proportion of commissioned production has continued to rise. It is not easy for foreign companies to acquire outstanding domestic companies. At present, the government's support for the instrumentation industry is growing. Last year alone and in the first half of this year, the Ministry of Science and Technology has set up six research topics on instrumentation, and government financial support has exceeded 100 million yuan. This unprecedented level of support allows domestic excellent instrument manufacturers to have a broader space for development. Analytical instruments still maintain a good momentum of development as the financial crisis sweeps the globe. The rapid growth of China's analytical instrument market is closely related to the country’s emphasis on food safety, environmental protection, disease prevention and control, product quality supervision, production safety, and major natural disaster monitoring and basic research.

1. The overall industry has grown steadily with a year-on-year increase

According to the data from the China Instrument Industry Association, in 2009, analytical instruments including industrial process analysis instruments, laboratory analysis instruments, environmental monitoring equipment and instrumentation industrial output value, industrial sales output maintained a steady increase, but the year-on-year increase was significantly lower than in 2008 . Export delivery values ​​maintained a negative growth except that environmental monitoring equipment maintained a slight increase. Among them, the output value of special instruments for environmental monitoring exceeded 9.2 billion yuan, an increase of 28.85% year-on-year, and the sales value reached 9.121 billion yuan, an increase of 30.82% year-on-year.

The data shows that in the analytical instrument industry, the growth rate of special instruments for environmental monitoring is the fastest, and the industrial process analysis instrument sub-industry also maintains a growth rate higher than the average level of the industry. The increase in experimental analysis instruments is significantly lower than the average level of the instrumentation industry. . This is mainly because the country has included environmental protection, energy conservation and emission reduction in its mid- and long-term development plans, introduced some mandatory policies and encouragement policies, and promoted the promotion and application of environmental monitoring instruments. In addition, the market for food safety monitoring equipment has grown significantly in response to the 2008 trihydroamine event.

2. Imports continue to grow and exports decline

As the overall import and export of the instrument and instrument industry in the country showed a negative growth, the import of analytical instruments kept growing, and the export decreased year-on-year. Among them, industrial process analysis instruments imported 448 million U.S. dollars, export value was 338 million U.S. dollars; the amount of experimental analytical instruments imported was nearly 2.7 billion U.S. dollars, and the export value was 600 million U.S. dollars. The total import and export deficit of the national instrumentation industry was 10.2 billion U.S. dollars, compared with 2008. A decrease of 170 million U.S. dollars, and an import and export deficit of 5.6 billion U.S. dollars.

The major reason for the large import volume of analytical instruments is that most of the high-end analytical instruments currently in use in China are still imported. Due to the high technical requirements of high-end analytical instruments, large R&D investment, and long research and development cycle, it is a huge challenge for domestic companies. Although in recent years there have emerged high-tech enterprises such as Concentration Technology, Skyray Instruments, General Analysis, East West Electronics, Beijing Nuoc, Snow Dilong, Hebei Xianhe, etc., but domestic companies still generally lack their own technologies. , The lack of original innovation capability of high-end products, the severe lack of R&D investment, the lack of systematic and long-term continuity of work, and the lack of domestic companies’ ability to develop high-end analytical instruments. Scientific research institutes and universities have poor access to scientific research results and industries. In the short term, they cannot produce high-end analytical instruments that meet the needs of the domestic market.

The decrease in the export of analytical instruments was mainly due to the outbreak of the international financial crisis since the second half of 2008. The economic situation at home and abroad deteriorated drastically, and foreign demand decreased.

For a long time, almost 100% of high-end analytical instruments have been occupied by imports, forcing domestic analytical instrument companies to change their existing R&D production models, and have gradually begun to develop high-end analytical instruments. Constantly optimized market environment, as well as the entry of more foreign analytical instrument companies, the competition prize for the domestic analytical instrument market has become more intense. Therefore, domestic analytical instrument manufacturers must face up to the crisis and opportunities in the market environment, increase investment, continuous innovation, in the development of science and technology on the road to success, to the world-class level.

Stability and reliability issues have become obstacles to the development of instrumentation in China

The reliability and stability of domestic instrumentation and automation systems are very different from those of foreign products. Its reliability issues have shaken the confidence of key industries such as metallurgy, electric power, and petrochemical industries in domestic products. As a result, localization of instrumentation and automation systems has been the slowest in the nationalization of major national technical equipment. Greatly affected the improvement of equipment manufacturing technology and product quality. Stability and reliability issues have become a serious obstacle to the development of China's instrumentation industry and technological innovation.

Reliability work is a comprehensive job. From the system point of view, the reliability work needs to eliminate and control all kinds of unreliable factors to the maximum extent possible in the entire product life cycle, and maximize the detection of unreliable factors. Defects, in order to achieve the most cost-saving, the most time-saving operation of the established reliability goals. It involves aspects such as product performance effectiveness, functional safety, service life, maintainability, environmental adaptability, and the full life cycle cost of the product. Reliability work requires systematic theoretical research, long-term data accumulation, careful experimental argumentation, and extensive investigation and analysis.