November 25, 2018 Source: Carbon Fiber Society

The current global carbon fiber manufacturing leaders are the United States, Japan and China. As China's investment in carbon fiber continues to increase, China's carbon fiber production continues to increase in world share. According to the “Investigation Report on In-depth Research and Investment Strategy Planning of China's Carbon Fiber Industry in 2018-2023” released by Prospective Industry Research Institute, the current carbon fiber production capacity in mainland China accounts for 17% of the global total, and Taiwan's production capacity accounts for 6% of the world. And more than Japan.

The demand for carbon fiber in the Chinese market has achieved high growth. According to statistics, the domestic market demand reached 19,563 tons in 2016, compared with 2015, an increase of 2,774 tons (16.5%). Among them, the core driving factor is the rapid growth of large tow carbon fiber for wind turbine blades; the estimated carbon fiber demand in 2017 reached 21911. Ton.

From the perspective of downstream demand, sports equipment still occupies half of the country. Steady development is a feature of this industry, and the realization of new big growth requires innovation in automated composite materials. In addition, wind turbine blades account for 15% of total demand, compared with several times in 2015. However, this growth is mainly due to the needs of the VESTAS family; if new international giants or domestic giants initiate this demand, in the next few years, we can expect to grow exponentially every year. From the current point of view, China's carbon fiber application in the aerospace and automotive fields is vastly different from the global market, which also provides a huge space for future development. In the next few years, aerospace, automotive and wind power blades will become the biggest growth point in China's carbon fiber market.

"Made in China 2025" plans carbon fiber technology route, carbon fiber will lay the entire industrial chain

In May 2015, the State Council officially released "Made in China 2025", which made an overall deployment of China's manufacturing transformation and upgrading and leapfrog development, and clarified the strategic tasks and priorities for building and manufacturing a strong country. Choose 10 major advantages and strategic industries as breakthrough points, and strive to reach international leading level or international advanced level by 2025.

The Prospective Industry Research Institute pointed out that the carbon fiber industry will have the following development trends.

Carbon fiber products are developing in the direction of stability and high-end. Although there are 3-4 domestic carbon fiber production enterprises with design capacity above 1,000 tons, but lack of core technical team, the stability of production process and process control are poor, and the quality and stability of carbon fiber products cannot be guaranteed. Very high. Therefore, it is an inevitable trend to achieve stable production of products and improve equipment utilization. According to statistics, at present, domestic carbon fiber accounts for only 4% of high-end applications in the three fields of aerospace, sports and leisure and industrial applications. It is necessary to devote pains to research, achieve technological breakthroughs, form a systematic and serialized carbon fiber industry chain development model, and break the monopoly of foreign high-end fields.

Seeking new market segments. At present, the high-end application field of carbon fiber is monopolized by developed countries such as Japan and the United States. Most of China's carbon fiber enterprise products are in the low-end field. For low-end applications such as sports and leisure, industry giants are likely to form synergies in price setting and research and research, and suppress domestic carbon fiber companies. Therefore, China's carbon fiber industry urgently needs to seek new market areas and achieve breakthrough development.

Enterprise transformation, mergers and acquisitions, layout of the complete industrial chain. The carbon fiber industry is a highly intensive technology and capital industry. It requires huge investment internally and is facing the pressure of international giants. Therefore, it is inevitable to face transformation, and integrate resources through mergers and acquisitions to form a large-scale carbon fiber production enterprise and participate in international competition. Among the related products of the carbon fiber industry chain, the value of the product is greatly increased from the raw silk to the carbon fiber to the composite material and the subsequent application design of the composite material. Through a systematic and serialized entire industrial chain, carbon fiber companies can reduce costs, increase profitability, and be able to face the competition of international giants and reverse the dilemma.