Japanese engineers said they were scared by the Chinese mechanical level, which has already taken half of the market!

At a Japanese industrial exhibition in early 2026, a veteran Japanese mechanical engineer with 30 years of experience wrote a statement. He said: "Looking up, Chinese manufacturers have already taken half of the global market." More importantly, he emphasized that the current Chinese machinery is no longer relying on "low price" to dominate the market, but rather on precision, delivery, and service that are all catching up — even surpassing in certain dimensions.

He said that in the 1980s and 1990s, "Japanese manufacturing" was almost synonymous with high-end manufacturing worldwide. From numerical control machine tools to industrial robots, Japanese companies, relying on extreme process control, strict quality standards, and stable supply chains, firmly occupied the global mid-to-high-end market. At that time, China was still solving the issue of "whether there was" or not, with a large number of equipment dependent on imports, and domestic machinery was often labeled as "rough" and "unreliable."

But changes have quietly occurred. Now, Chinese manufacturing is shifting from "scale expansion" to "quality leap." Universities and enterprises jointly cultivate engineering talents, and the vast domestic market provides a natural "test field" — any new equipment, as long as its performance meets the standards, can quickly find an application scenario for verification and iteration.

This "application-driven innovation" model is exactly the "speed advantage" that Japanese engineers feel. Take a type of high-precision laser cutting machine as an example. Chinese companies may have problems with heat deformation control in the first generation of products, but they can release an improved version within three months based on customer feedback; while Japanese counterparts often need more than half a year for internal reviews, risk assessments, and multiple rounds of testing before they dare to launch the product. As a result: when Japan is still perfecting the "perfect first version," Chinese manufacturers have already completed three rounds of product iterations, not only solving the initial defects but also adding new features such as intelligent diagnostics and remote maintenance.

Original article: toutiao.com/article/1856092120830976/

Statement: This article represents the personal views of the author.