Development of high-end machine tools accelerates; guide rails and ball screw play important roles in industrial automation equipment. With the continuous advancement of industrial automation, the machine tool industry has risen to the core of national development strategy.
In recent years, China has successively introduced multiple relevant policies to accelerate the development of high-end CNC machine tools, and the localization process of high-end machine tools is expected to speed up. Guide rails and ball screws are widely used in industrial automation equipment such as CNC machine tools, milling machines, and lathes. Through the precise positioning and stability of guide rails and ball screws, high-precision machining and positioning of workpieces can be achieved. The application of guide rails and ball screws can not only adjust the height, position, and angle of the workpiece but also greatly improve work efficiency and production quality.
Ball screws are used in conjunction with guide rails and are key components for transmission and positioning in CNC machine tools. With the improvement in the performance of ball screws, servo motors, and control units, the reduction mechanism can be omitted from the feed system of CNC machine tools, directly connecting the servo motor with the ball screw. This improvement brings multiple advantages: on one hand, it simplifies the entire system structure, reduces error-prone links, and improves reliability; on the other hand, due to reduced moment of inertia, servo characteristics are also improved, resulting in faster response speed and higher positioning accuracy of the machine tool.
Ball Screws and guide rails hold significant value in the machine tool industry and have huge market potential. Taking a common three-axis CNC machine tool as an example, its configuration includes three linear axes: X, Y, Z. Each linear axis usually requires a ball screw. Considering the unit price of high-precision domestic ball screws is about 1000 yuan per piece, the total value of ball screws in a high-precision three-axis CNC machine tool is about 3000 yuan. Considering the overall price of a three-axis CNC machine tool is usually in the range of several hundred thousand yuan, the cost of screws occupies a certain proportion of the total machine tool cost. Referring to the raw material procurement proportion data of Kede CNC and Neway CNC, transmission materials account for about 20%.
According to MIR DATABANK data, the scale of China's metal cutting machine tool market was about 113.5 billion yuan in 2023. Affected by the industry cycle in the first three quarters of 2024, the domestic market size decreased by about 6% year-on-year. It is estimated to decrease by about 6.1% for the whole year of 2024, with the Chinese metal cutting machine tool market size expected to be about 100 billion yuan in 2024. Therefore, the estimated market size for screws and guide rails in China's machine tool field is about twenty billion yuan.