Foundry industry has always enjoyed the title of “mother of industry” and occupies a very important position in the national economy. The foundry industry is the foundation of pillar industries such as automobile, petrochemical, iron and steel, electric power, shipbuilding, textile and equipment manufacturing. Transportation tools, machinery manufacturing and even high-precision aerospace and national defense industries are inseparable from the production of relevant parts and components provided by the foundry industry.
China has a long history in the ancient foundry industry and has made great contributions to the improvement of foundry technology and the development of foundry industry in the world. In the past decade, through technological transformation, a number of domestic foundry enterprises have made great progress and changed, and a number of backbone foundry factories with high level have been formed. According to relevant data, China has become the world’s largest casting producer. In terms of output, China’s casting output has exceeded 10000 tons per year since the O’s of the 20th century. It has ranked first in the world for five consecutive years since surpassing the United States in 20 (x). In addition to its high output, China has 24000 huge casting enterprises and 1.25 million employees, which is 1.25% of the total of 19331 enterprises in 34 other casting producing countries (or regions) in the world. It has truly become a large foundry country in the world.
However, China is far from becoming a foundry power. Compared with other industrial developed countries, we still have a big gap in product quality, product structure, production facilities, enterprise scale, production efficiency, environmental protection and many other aspects. The overall economic benefits of China’s foundry industry are poor. There is still a large gap between China’s foundry industry and other foundry powers, such as the United States, Japan, Germany and France, in terms of per capita output, per capita output value, casting quality and energy consumption. The average labor productivity of China’s foundry industry is less than one fifth of that of foundry developed countries. As for the ability to explore the market, there is a greater gap between the level of marketing services. The reason why the overall quality of castings in China is poor, the casting price is low and the economic benefit is poor is related to the backward technology, equipment and process of a considerable number of small casting enterprises, but more importantly, the management level of the whole industry, especially the quality awareness and quality control level, is not suitable for the requirements of the highly competitive market economy. In addition, management level, product quality and environmental protection are all restricting the further sustainable and healthy development of China’s foundry industry.