The core competitiveness of high-end machine tool companies lies in R&D and specialization

German and Swiss machine tools are known for their special machines. Its high precision, low production, and very expensive, for all kinds of high-end customers. German companies are known for their professionalism. Each company focuses on its own domain, not the products that others have already done, and most of them represent the technical direction of their respective fields. Many of these companies have a hundred years of technology accumulation.

One of the world's largest machine tool manufacturers, Germany's DMG company to do the whole machine direction. They used synthetic granite to make the bed, and all the installation holes were embedded. The material was shock-resistant, and the bed had a solid structure with high quality and good stability. Their machine bed can be made rigid in machining. The machine tool must be assembled with high performance and reliability components to ensure overall reliability.

At present, the world’s recognized machine tool powerhouse is Germany, Switzerland, Japan and the United States.

In Germany, Japan and other high-end machine tool manufacturing countries, many companies have small scale, but the output value is high. Its core competitiveness lies in R&D investment and specific positioning.

According to reports, HEIDENHAIN, a famous length measuring company in Germany, spares no effort to improve its high-precision, reproducible product technology. In the 1990s, more than 200 million yuan was invested in the construction of a production workshop, manufacturing master gratings and replicating gratings. This workshop is a constant temperature, the error is plus or minus one hundredth of a degree, three levels of vibration isolation, the amplitude is in the positive and negative one and a half nanometers. It has atomic clocks and length transfer standards that China's National Bureau of Measurement does not have. These conditions are the highest in the world, making it the leader in the field of machine tool detection components. Each year, HEIDENHAIN's R&D expenditures account for 16% of its sales.

The Swiss company Mageler specializes in grinding machines and its core competitiveness is stable. All of their product core components are manufactured by themselves; procedures, equipment and assembly inspection procedures are unchanged for 30 years; staff composition is also very stable, basically over 40 years old. This guarantees long-term stability of quality. The company employs more than 100 people and produces more than 60 million euros annually.

German experience has shown that the production of high-end parts depends on long-term basic research. Some often overlooked cases require careful research under high-precision requirements. For example, the analysis of friction is a complex knowledge. Estimates of friction require a variety of complex mathematical models. These are all from the frontiers of basic research in tribology.

For another example, CNC machine tools need to react based on temperature to offset the effect of thermal expansion and contraction. The temperature change curve of different materials will also need to summarize the approximate model from long-term experiments. This requires companies to have a large number of basic research talents with innovative capabilities.