China, well known as the world's largest market and the most economic-flourishing regions in the world, has expressed us with its enormous economic growth for more than a decade. Under the latest five-year plan (2006-2010), China speeds up its infrastructure, granting more momentum on building and hardware sectors.
Such an ever-large national construction is aimed at the coming Olympic Games Beijing in 2008 and the International World exhibition EXPO Shanghai in 2010. According to surveys, over the five years this demand will double or more, in dance with the boosting domestic housing industry. The gigantic market potency is realized by its dense population of 1.3 billion, almost one fifth of the world population, and over 100 cities with more than one million inhabitants. Thanks to the growing boom on private home ownership, particularly in wealthy coastal regions such as Beijing, Shanghai and Canton, the needs for quality houses and remolding tend to increase. Therefore, the higher-end building materials as domestic products nowadays cannot meet the market needs, especially those from abroad, get their niches on Chinese mainland market. The up-and-coming operations of infrastructure, factories and housing projects create an enormous demand for hardware, tools, and locks.

Rosy DIY Tooling Sky
As the proportion of private enterprises is more than 90%, the up-and-coming privatization also influences the housing market, intriguing the desire of customers to adapt their homes to their personal tastes. That causes a boom for DIY products. While living standards are improved in China, people in possession of private houses have more pastime to do house decoration and remolding, consequently, the hardware for DIY will sell like hot cakes. In line with the interest in home decoration and improvement has come a desire for better quality materials. Home ownership has been the catalyst behind the home improvements market and has encouraged consumers to engage in DIY and home improvement/ decorating activities The China tool industry emerged in the 1950s and 60s and staged to rapid growth in the 1980s.
Currently, the industry has fundamentally full-built as a complete production system from upstream to downstream, with about 5,000 factories hiring about half a million employees. Each factory has 150-167 workers to produce electric-powered, pneumatic, hydraulic and hand tools. The per-capital productivity has reached RMB 60,000 and some even climbed to 200,000. The form of these enterprises has diversely established from original state ownership, collective ownership, private enterprises, joint ventures and solely foreign-funded.
In China, 78 % of the tool factories locate in Zhejiang, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Tianjin. Among above-mentioned areas, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, so-called the Yangtze River Delta contribute to half of national tool production. China embraces both intensely-populated domestic market and overseas market. There are thousands of kinds of hand tools made to meet markets in 13 large categories, such as wrenches, pliers, pincers, saws, hammers, screwdrivers, files, and plumbing, construction and gardening tools.

China-made tools have successfully targeted at foreign chain shops such as Wal-Mart and Sears of the United States, OBI of Germany and B&Q of Britain.
China¡¯s cost advantage makes itself the world factory in tool sector, attracting myriad of world tool companies to set up manufacturing bases, especially from Taiwan. Taiwanese hardware factories have been investing in China order to restart their second life. Meanwhile the growing OEM joint venture cooperation there will accelerate the transfer of hardware industry from the world to China and promote the integrating of resources of China hardware industry and the technological innovations progress. By statistics, Taiwan has over 5000 tool manufacturers and now one tenth of them have set up the factories in Chinese Mainland.

Big HARDWARE Chances
Driven by modernization, societal changes and an increase in disposable income, China's demands for building materials are huge. Since 1992, China's building materials market has been burgeoning at annual growth rate of approximately 15-30%, having no shadow in the near future. The housing boom also boosts the needs for some building hardware such as door locks, door knobs, door handles, hinges, supper bar for glass walls, connectors, water & energy saving showers, brass flares, and compression & pipe fittings and even more. Today, the amount of local hardware enterprises exceeds 40,000, with the employees more than 1,500,000 to create US$ 23 billion of industry output. The volume of export is US$ 8 billions as imports amount to US$ 3 billion. Boosting by higher economic development, China hardware annual sales amount to about RMB 80 billions.