| China glass lined industry starts prospering in the1950s. It solved the urgent needs of the chemical industry and made important contributions in promoting economic growth in China. Thanks to the initiation of Reform and Opening-up policy, China’s economy registers nearly3decades of rapid growth, by far China has become a super power in the glass-lined equipment field,however, this industry is big but not yet strong, because of the late start, fast development, inadequate R&D investment and low level redundant construction, there is still a wide gap when compared with foreign counterpartsWith foreign companies entering into this market in China since late1990s, technology and quality weaknesses of Chinese glass-lined industry are fully exposedin market competition, only because of small size and high price of products offered by those foreign enterprises, Chinese glass-lined industry still kept some market. Nevertheless, with the step-up of production scale and cost control in foreign companies, unit price gradually fall, market share of Chineseglass-lined industry will be eroded under the threat of high quality and technological advantages of foreign companies. By then, Chineseglass-lined industry will be stuck in a severe bottleneck, just like many other labor-intensive domestic equipment manufacturing industriesdo. Besides, the domestic glass-lined industry should have been committed to innovation and development to narrow the technology gap with foreign competitors, but it is short-sighted enough to engage in price wars in low and mid-end markets, handing over the high-end market to foreign companies. Chinese companies competes on the ground of price, homogeneous low-quality products, not on technical progress and productdifferentiation, which also causes a major concern onproductquality and safety in downstream chemical industry. Under such circumstances, Chinese glass-lined industry is struggling to survive, not capable of affording R&D investment, let alone implementing development strategy.Though analysis, factors affecting China’s glass-lined industry are varied, and this paper summarizes them in eight perspectives:First, lack of human resources; second, obsolete or obsolescent production equipment; third, low and disorderly competition; fourth, inadequate investment in research and development; fifth,short government support; sixth, foreign technical monopoly; seventh, poor implementation of standards; eighth, insufficient research and development capabilities of enterprise per se. An in-depth look through the eight setbacks reveals that the most fundamental onesare poor implementation of standards and insufficient research and development capabilities of enterprise per se, only by solving these two problems can other problems be solved. This papertries to tackle these two fundamental problemsrelying on Glass-lined Industry Association, borrowing the operation model of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)and Lloyd’s Register of Shipping (LR) by setting up aGlass-Lined Equipment Testing Center running as a company, whose role is to make up for inadequate national supervision, strengthen self-discipline and tighten standard implementation. On the basis of standardizing industry specification and the theory of strategic alliance, the author draw on experience fromvertical technological alliances of Chinese oil industry and horizontal marketalliance of Chinese dye industry, and also propose to establish a technical innovation alliance with Glass-Lined Equipment R&D Center as a mainstay functioning as an enterprise, so as to integrate resources from all industry players. The role of establishing two centers are firstlyto rapidly beef up core technical strength of glass-lined manufacturing equipment and secondly to reduce companyoperating costs. The author holds that these two centers, if established, will be of a strong practical significance to promote technological progress and enhance market competitiveness of Chineseglass-lined industry. |
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