he vice president and Secretary General of the 7th China Foundry Association Council Mr. Wen Ping released the 2013 statistics of China foundry industry. Data shows that the total output of castings amounts to 44.5 million tons in 2013, a 4.7% increase over the last year, and the output value reaches nearly 550 billion RMB. Aluminum castings and ductile cast iron are the fast growing sectors. However, the import and export of castings are declining.
Wen Ping noted that aluminum and ductile cast iron grew fast with production of 5.2 million tons and 11.6 million tons respectively, turning out to be a year-on-year increase of 16.9% and 6.4%.
Wen Ping also said that except from the castings used in engineering machinery, machine tool and ship sectors declined, castings grew in automobile, agricultural machinery, mining, heavy machinery, cast pipe, railway transportation, power plant and electricity. Automobile and agricultural machinery castings grew significantly, which were 12.9% and 5%.
According to Wen Ping’s analysis, the fast development of automobile and agricultural machinery industry has stimulated the castings growth. For example, the commercial vehicles grew 16.5% in 2013 so as to drive the requirement of aluminum castings. Besides, automobile castings grew 26.5%, which was the highest.
In terms of castings import and export, the export of various castings in 2013 amounted to 1.779 million tons, declining 10.1% compared with the 1.978 million tons in 2012. The export valued at 2.87 billion USD, declining 3.4% compared with the 2.97 million tons in 2012.
From China’s Customs statistics, the import of castings was only 20,000 tons in 2013, the average price of import was up to 7,483 USD/t, which meant the import castings were high value-added castings.