In recent years, the export volume of fasteners from China sees rapid growth, leading China to be the major fastener exporter in the world. Despite of the prosperity of domestic fastener industry, there are still some problems that worth our attention, among which the unreasonable structure of fastener products in the most urgent. Most of domestic fastener companies still enlarge their market share by increasing products quantities, with many products being of low quality and price. As a result, most of our fastener products are exported to the equipment maintenance market in foreign countries, while only a small part of them can enter the mainstream market.
With the dramatic growth of export volume of Chinese fasteners, the pressure on our export is also accumulating, making many people worry that the export volume would decline in 2007, which, in turn, would put more pressure on the domestic market. As a matter of fact, there is nothing to worry about:
1. Along with the long-term development, China has established a fastener manufacturing system which, in the term of global market, has biggest scale, full categories and good quality. The fasteners from China are featured with good quality and reasonable price, which boast strong comprehensive competitiveness. In this global biggest fastener base, the big volume of export is sure to be something beyond any doubt. It¡¯s estimated that the export volume would overpass 2.5 billion dollars in the next 2-3 years.
2. Recently, as the manufacturing capacity of fasteners in Western countries has declined, the global economy sees increasing demand and growing reliance on Chinese fasteners. Therefore, despite of the ongoing conflicts in fastener trade, the export volume of Chinese fasteners, in the long run, will be still on the rise, because the world market couldn¡¯t find complete replacement of Chinese fasteners in a short time.
In this way, it's clear to us that the status of China being the major fastener exporter is a non-reversing trend, which is a foreseen outcome of the industrial restructuring and rebuilding. Meanwhile, we can not deny there are some problems in the export process, among which the most particular one is the disorder of exporting, reflected by the facts that the export volume was increasing too fast, the exporting period and imported countries were over-concentrated, the price and added-value were far away from satisfactory. Due to these factors, some unnecessary conflicts were emerging, which were not conducive to the healthy and sustainable development of fastener trade.
Therefore, in order to adjust to the new trend and the changing market of Chinese fastener trade, it¡¯s necessary to establish a nationwide warning system of fastener export and import, which can provide scientific data and feasible suggestions for related departments once some problems arise. Based on observation and research, the related institutions can make macro instruction toward exported quantities, structure and time of domestic fasteners through tariff, exchange rate and quota, etc.
Translated by Alan
