Our country's brake line industry has developed alongside the automotive industry. Prior to the 1980s, the brake line industry progressed relatively slowly. After the 1980s, through continuous technological introduction and transformation by parts manufacturers, separation from整车manufacturers, and private enterprises reducing costs, improving production processes, and enhancing product quality, the domestic brake line industry experienced rapid growth. Following the entry into the WTO, with further market opening for brake lines, international brake line companies saw the potential in China's rapidly growing automotive market and its cost advantage, accelerating their pace in establishing joint ventures or wholly-owned factories in China.
The brake line industry is fundamental to the development of the automotive sector, playing a crucial role within it. As the world economy becomes more globalized and markets integrate, the importance of brake lines in the automotive industry continues to grow. Market development experience and data indicate that compared to countries with a similar number of vehicles, China's over 100 million vehicles are relatively young. With increasing vehicle age, the demand for vehicle maintenance and repair will rise annually, presenting a promising market outlook for brake line companies. In the context of global integration, faced with increasingly fierce competition, major global automotive companies are reducing costs by expanding production scales while gradually decreasing their self-manufacturing rates for brake lines, adopting a global procurement strategy for parts. At the same time, international parts suppliers, in pursuit of greater profits, are reducing or even halting production of some non-competitive products, instead focusing on procuring products with comparative advantages globally.
With the rapid development of China's brake line industry and the entry of foreign parts manufacturers into the country, there has been significant progress in the localization of brake lines. Currently, the domestic matching rate for commercial vehicles and mid-to-low-end passenger cars during production has reached nearly 100%. After 60 years of development, especially with the rapid growth in the past decade, China's automotive industry has now become a genuine pillar industry of the national economy. However, despite entering a stable development phase, the automotive industry in China still faces numerous challenges in a complex and ever-changing domestic and international environment. In the early stages of the domestic brake line industry, the localization level was very low. In 1994, the national automotive industry policy was issued, which proposed the requirement for localization and implemented a policy linking the localization rate with preferential import tax rates, laying a solid foundation for the localization and development of parts.
With the growth of China's automotive industry, brake lines have also made significant advancements. Over the years, some domestic parts manufacturers have actively explored technological research and independent innovation, achieving certain results, yet they are far from meeting the demands of the whole vehicle industry. The overall foundation of China's brake lines is weak, with insufficient research and development capabilities and a lack of key core technologies, which have seriously impacted the development of China's automotive industry. Accelerating the development of China's brake lines is imperative. After years of development, the quality of China's branded parts has greatly improved, but there is still a gap compared to foreign-funded enterprises' products, particularly in terms of product consistency and reliability, which need further enhancement.
