(Yicai Global) Sept. 28 -- In the decade between 2012 and 2021, the added value of China’s equipment industry in China climbed 8.2 percent a year on average, according to the latest official figures.

The industry’s emerging players had combined operating income of more than CNY20 trillion (USD2.77 trillion) last year, an 18.6 percent gain on the previous year, according to Wang Weiming, director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s first equipment industry department.

Machine tools that provide smart production equipment and parts are the core of the manufacturing industry, their technical level determining the manufacturing capacity of countries and regions.

“The equipment manufacturing industry is in a critical period of moving toward the middle and high end, and its support for the economy and society is more prominent,” Wang said at a press conference. “But there are also problems such as weak industrial foundations, risks that the industrial and supply chains will break, and the improvement of the industrial development environment.”

For more than a decade, China has developed high-quality companies, Wang said, adding that the machine tool industry has a complete industrial system that serves as strong support for the competitiveness of manufacturing and ranks second worldwide.

In the equipment industry, the market share of domestic machine tools increased to 32 percent from less than 1 percent more than a decade ago, and that of digital cutting tools jumped to 45 percent from 10 percent.

Robotics research and development, manufacturing, and application are important indicators of a country's level of scientific and technological innovation and high-end manufacturing. In the past decade, China's robotics industry has flourished.

Operating income at the country’s robotics firms exceeded CNY130 billion (USD19 billion) last year, and output of industrial robots reached 366,000 units, a 10-fold increase from 2015, making China the world's largest market for such robots, according to MIIT data.

A decade ago, China’s robotics market was dominated by overseas products, as domestic robots could only be supplied to foreign system integrators at the lowest end of the value chain.

Editor: Futura Costaglione