Machine tools are called “industrial mother machines” and are the core equipment for manufacturing machines and the cornerstone supporting the development of the entire manufacturing industry.
In the past few decades, China’s machine tool industry has been facing the development dilemma of “big but not strong”: although output has ranked first in the world all year round, the high-end market has long been dominated by overseas brands, and core technology shortcomings have become a key bottleneck restricting industrial upgrading.
Recently, an intelligent transformation in the machine tool industry in Zaozhuang, Shandong and Tengzhou has attracted widespread attention in the industry. The core of the transformation is to equip traditional machine tools with “intelligent brains” that can make independent decisions.
The production model of traditional machine tools highly relies on manual experience: skilled technicians are required to keep an eye on the dashboard and adjust parameters based on experience. Not only is the programming process cumbersome, but the machining accuracy is also highly dependent on the technical level of the operator. A mature skilled technician often takes several years to train, and talent gaps have become a common problem plaguing the entire industry.
Now in Tengzhou’s production workshop, this scene has fundamentally changed: relying on intelligent sensing and adaptive control technology, the upgraded intelligent machine tools can sense subtle changes in temperature, vibration, and cutting force during the production process in real time, automatically optimize the rotation speed and tool path, and stabilize the processing accuracy at the micron level. The overall equipment utilization rate is about 30% higher than that of traditional machine tools.
More importantly, the supporting equipment life cycle management system can predict failures in advance, plan maintenance plans, and transform machine tools from “passive execution of instructions” in the past to “active thinking and decision-making” today. This is not a simple automation upgrade, but a reconstruction of the entire production logic: in the past, humans controlled machines, and now machines assist humans and even complete production decisions autonomously.
In addition to the reconstruction of production logic, the business model of the local machine tool industry has also ushered in a comprehensive upgrade.
Most traditional machine tool companies make money by selling equipment separately, and their income ceiling is obvious.
After installing the “smart brain”, local companies launched the world’s first AIMT artificial intelligence machine tool and achieved mass production. It has pioneering advantages such as human-machine collaboration, voice interaction, and multi-modal large model data integration. Currently, 12 new intelligent production lines have been launched locally, covering the entire industry chain such as core components, complete machine manufacturing, and CNC systems. The independently developed AI robot dispatching center platform has realized the integration of equipment interconnection, data interoperability, and intelligent dispatching.
Nowadays, local companies no longer only sell machine tools individually, but provide customers with integrated customized solutions of “industrial base machine + industrial software + AI robot”. The shift from “selling individual machines” to “selling ecology” is a qualitative industrial upgrade in itself.
Data shows that the local machine tool industry cluster’s annual revenue will reach 1.217 billion yuan in 2025. In 2024, it has become the first machine tool enterprise cluster in the Lunan Economic Zone with a revenue of more than 1 billion yuan, with a customer return rate as high as 46.22%.
It is reported that Tengzhou is currently home to more than 400 machine tool and supporting companies, with an annual output of more than 200,000 machine tools (sets) and an annual output value of over 26 billion yuan. The domestic market share of small and medium-sized CNC drilling and milling machines exceeds 80%.
From traditional resource-based industries in the past to today’s high-end machine tool industry cluster, from “manufacturing” to “intelligent manufacturing”, Zaozhuang is redefining its industrial coordinates, and the AI integration practice of the local machine tool industry is also tearing off the old label of “big but not strong” for the national machine tool industry, and exploring a replicable high-end upgrade path.
