In 2011, China's machine tool industry continued the high-speed growth in 2010. In terms of import and export output value, it reflects the accelerated upgrading of market demand structure and the obvious increase in users' demand for medium and high-end grinder and surface grinder machine tool products, which is also a new opportunity for Chinese machine tool enterprises to make key breakthroughs. In 2011, the import growth rate of metal processing machine tools was as high as 40.6%, 11.2 percentage points higher than the growth rate of output value of similar machine tools in China. Imports from Germany and Japan accounted for two-thirds of the total, pushing up the average unit price of metal processing machine tool imports, up 33.2% year-on-year. It reflects the accelerated upgrading of market demand structure and the obvious increase in users' demand for medium and high-end products. It also reflects that domestic medium and high-end products still can not meet the requirements of this change in many aspects, such as technical level, industrialization, market adaptability and overall service.

At present, China's machine tool industry has a considerable scale. A large number of scientific and technological achievements in the machine tool industry have entered the application field, and the manufacturing level of individual products is even close to the international advanced level. A number of medium and high-grade machine tools also serve key fields such as automobile, aerospace, shipbuilding and energy, and provide complete sets of equipment for foreign high-end users. For example, Jinan No. 2 Machine Tool Co., Ltd. won the bid in one fell swoop in the bidding project of the press production line of Ford company in the United States, and will provide it with two of the world's most advanced press production lines, with a total value of up to 1 billion yuan.

However, the large number of imports shows that China's machine tool product structure still can not meet the domestic market's demand for medium and high-end products. Among the imported products, China imports a lot of machine tool parts and cutting tools, indicating that the bottleneck of functional parts in China has not been significantly changed.

Industry experts said that a large part of China's imported machine tools belong to middle-end machine tool products, and the demand for middle-grade machine tool products has increased significantly, reflecting the defects of domestic medium and high-grade products in technical level and industrialization.

In the future, international giants will rapidly occupy China's machine tool market with low price and medium-grade machine tool products assembled with high technology, which will pose a severe challenge to China's domestic machine tool enterprises. In the future, in the period of industry transformation and upgrading, it will be the best choice for China's machine tool industry to focus on the middle-end machine tool market and then advance to the high-end market.