China's quenching equipment industry

In the past decade, the pace of China's quenching equipment industry going global has significantly accelerated, shifting from simple product exports to a new stage of collaborative output of technology, brand, and localized services. The export scale of the industry continues to climb, with the export value of quenching equipment reaching 7.83 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 14.2%. The market has expanded rapidly, with the main export destinations extending from the traditional Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe to South America, among which the export growth to Vietnam, Mexico and Türkiye has exceeded 20%. This process benefits from multiple drivers: the demand for upgrading the manufacturing industry of the countries along the 'the Belt and Road', the high cost performance advantage of Chinese equipment, and the tariff reduction and logistics facilitation brought about by trade agreements such as RCEP (for example, the China EU train reduces the delivery cycle by 40%). Faced with external challenges such as tariffs imposed by the United States, companies are actively restructuring their global supply chains, setting up factories overseas through the 'regional manufacturing center+localized production' model, and accelerating the transformation towards digitization and serviceization - the installation rate of remote diagnostic systems has jumped from 31% in 2023 to 79% in 2025. However, the industry still faces challenges such as dependence on high-end technology (with a dependence on high-end equipment imports reaching 67.3% by 2024) and international certification barriers. Overall, China's quenching equipment is moving from a 'cost dependent export' to a new global paradigm of 'technology brand dual drive'.