Liaoning Province, a traditional heavy industrial center in northeast China, is aiming to be a major digitally-controlled machine tool production center in four years.
By 2005, the sales of Liaoning-made machine tools are expected to climb to 35,000, of which, 6,500 will be digitally-controlled, said Liu Guoqiang, vice-governor of Liaoning.
Currently, Liaoning is capable of producing 18,000 ordinary machine tools and 2,500 digitally-controlled machine tools annually. Their products fall into 1,000 varieties in 12 categories. It generated 2.3 billion yuan (US$0.28 billion) in sales value last year, the highest in China.
The province led China in the production of ordinary, large or digitally-controlled machine tools. However, it lagged behind its counterparts in other countries in terms of production scale, new product development and production cycles, Liu said.
To gain a competitive edge, Liaoning is to build Sino-foreign joint ventures and develop high-speed precision, environmentally- friendly digitally-controlled machine tools, he added.
(Xinhua News Agency April 15, 2002)
