Chinese machine tool manufacturers have actively expanded production capacity and operated at full throttle to fulfill soaring orders, driven by robust demand from emerging industries such as humanoid robots and new energy vehicles (NEVs) since the beginning of 2026.
At an assembly workshop of a machine tool manufacturing enterprise in Dongguan of south China's Guangdong Province, workers were busy assembling more than 100 five-axis computer numerical control machines.
Since early this year, orders from sectors like humanoid robots and NEVs have increased substantially, with an order backlog extending through September of this year. To cope with this booming market demand, this factory plans to further expand its production capacity in the second half of the year.
According to its head Huang Guangjing, the order volume has increased by approximately 30 percent compared to the same period last year.
With the rapid development of China's high-end manufacturing industry and emerging fields such as humanoid robots, NEVs, and aerospace, the market has a huge demand for high-precision, automated, and integrated machine tools, creating more opportunities for domestic machine tool enterprises to advance into the high-end equipment sector.
"Our company primarily produces components for humanoid robot joints and drones. This year, we plan to procure a total of more than 300 high-end machine tools from several domestic suppliers, which represents a more than 50-percent increase in procurement volume compared to last year. The delivery time for domestic machine tools is about 45 days, whereas that from abroad takes three to six months. Moreover, domestic machine tools of the same type are roughly 40 percent cheaper than their foreign counterparts," said Liu Bo, a production director of a mechanical parts enterprise based in Shenzhen.
Another machine tool manufacturer is also experiencing a similarly busy period. Unlike in previous years, there has been a notable increase this year in demand for customized machine tools from customers in the NEV sector.
"We expanded our production capacity by about one-third this year. As new energy vehicles iterate, customers have increasing requirements and a lot of demand for tailored functions of new models. Currently, we are facing a shortage of debugging workers in the workshop and always hiring," said Huang Yiyu, head of the sales department of the machine tool manufacturer.
Machine tools, also known as the "mother machines" of industry, are the core cornerstone of the manufacturing industry.
Robust demand from emerging sectors pushes up machine tool orders in China
