Hydraulic seal industry towards the foreign market | DHS

As fastener manufacturing powers, China’s manufacturing enterprises have accumulated much experience and encountered many hardship. We have been struggling and have undergone many frustrations since our access to the foreign market. Although we made some progress, we are still in the tough situation of struggling to process excessive orders and to compete against local companies. Are we hindered by the quality or technological shortcuts? In my opinion, the key to the problem is that there are drawbacks in our development model.

There is a gap between domestic and foreign standards in the hydraulic fastener industry .

It's easy to find that there is a huge gap between the domestic industry standards and foreign ones. As far as the raw materials standards of fasteners are concerned, the domestic product standards generally do not specify materials but only the chemical composition required for the mechanical properties. By contrast, there will be specific requirements for materials by some America standards such as ASTM standards. There is no corresponding steel brand in compliance with foreign standards, which certainly causes some difficulties for the export. Although some domestic enterprises have realized that and have developed new steel materials complying with foreign fastener standards, this is only a small step forward. Thus, foreign standards are needed to be promoted and perfected in our whole domestic fastener industry.

Many domestic faster hydraulic seal manufacturers have an unclear positioning and have been producing recklessly, lacking in docking and cooperation with OEMs for product matching. Most of the domestic hydraulic seal enterprises, as it were, have mass-produced products just based on a uniform standard with no concern about whether their products can satisfy the complementary requirements of the OEM products in the market. They only focus on their own output. Thus, each fastener produced has become a "universal" one with its mechanical stability difficult to be guaranteed.

Compared with foreign brands, what we lack is the "single-minded spirit of utter devotion". Speaking of this, I highly support the OEM development model mentioned by Wang Changjiang, the expert in the construction machinery industry. This model can also apply well to the development of the fastener industry. As mentioned before，fastener manufacturers need to cooperate with OEMs to establish a one-to-one or one-to-many mode and form a complete production network.
I think that if fastener manufacturers want to occupy the foreign market and compete against the foreign brands, we should first lay a good groundwork, that is, to perfect our industrial standards and to cooperate with the OEMs. Also, we should make improvements in our technology to win our own market share.

To be specific, first, there is a lack of industrial standards. Second of all, as an indispensable part of the accessory industry, the fastener industry and the manufacturers in this industry have an unclear positioning of themselves. In other words, there is a long-standing independent development pattern between the fastener manufacturers and the OEMs. That is why our domestic fastener enterprises have long been unable to occupy the foreign market and to compete against the foreign brands.