State-owned China Light Industry Machinery Corp. said China is shifting its export destinations for plastics machinery from developing to developed countries.
``Chinese-made plastic machinery exports mainly targeted developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In recent years, machinery makers [have been] successfully opening up the markets in developed countries,'' engineer Wang Shuying said at China-India Plastics Industry Summit 2007 in Guangzhou.
Light Industry Machinery Corp. is the only national enterprise for light-industry machinery and maintains an official database of imports and exports of plastics machinery. One index indicator for developed markets is the value of exports to Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, Taiwan, Russia, Singapore, Germany, Italy and South Korea. The figure reached $680 million in 2005, accounting for 51 percent of the total exports of plastics machinery in that year, Wang said. She said exports to those areas grew 45 percent annually from 2002-05.
While China is selling more plastics machinery in overseas markets, it also is buying a lot from foreign manufacturers. Based on dollar value, imported machinery represents 80 percent of the Chinese market.
``Bear in mind, an average import machine is four times as expensive as a Chinese one,'' she said. Another major reason is many foreign-invested plastic processing companies use imported machinery.
``The trend is, foreign investors are increasingly using machinery, vs. money, as their investment,'' she said.
Foreign-invested processors represent 75 percent of China's imported plastics machinery, followed by state-owned Chinese processors with a share of 16 percent and private companies with 7 percent.
Data also shows 91 percent of China's plastics machinery imports come from Japan, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Italy, the U.S., Hong Kong and Canada.