China's shared machine tools

Since 2010, sharing economy has taken root in China. In recent years, the concept of sharing economy was no strange to the public and became popular all over the country. Shared bike, shared cars, shared umbrellas, shared basketballs, shared washing machines, shared sleeping cabins... In more than 10 years, the concept of sharing seems to be everywhere. But behind the scenes are several rounds of shuffling of the sharing economy. The silent exit of shared umbrella and the lawsuit of ofo ( One brand of shared bikes) all seem to show that "sharing economy" is not that easy.

In fact, what the sharing economy further explores is all the values above the traditional leasing economy and beyond the use value. Its core is to reduce the threshold for users and create the possibility for owners to realize the value of “idle” goods. In essence, sharing economy should revitalize idle resources and share with others with compensation, so as to improve the utilization efficiency of social resources. But now the domestic sharing economy is more like a kind of leasing with the name of sharing. It is not to revitalize idle resources, but to stimulate new demand through a large amount of investment and achieve the purpose of occupying the market. Therefore, the shared product assets in the market are very heavy. If you don't pay attention to them, you will easily fall into the vortex of losses.

The concept of shared machine tool was first put forward and practiced by Shenyang machine tool corp, a leading machine tool manufacturer in the industry. In 2014, Shenyang Machine Tool successfully launched the world's first i5 intelligent machine tool, which laid the foundation for shared machine tools. At the beginning, Shenyang Machine Tool lease machine tools to customers through the way of "zero down payment", charging by hour or by processing capacity. The basis of settlement is the data transmitted by the machine tool operation.

Subsequently, Shenyang machine tool introduced the concept of "i5 intelligent manufacturing Valley". It focuses on the concept of "as long as you have the ability and creativity, you can" live with your bags "in i5 intelligent manufacturing Valley, and there are people who can help you with the plants, equipment, capital, technology and even orders.".

If we want to say how the future development of shared machine tools is, then we should return to the essence of sharing economy. Sharing economy is to transfer the "redundant" use right for the owner through the platform and in the form of C2C. Just like Uber links private owners and passengers. What platform earns is service fee, intermediary fee, and advertising revenue brought by traffic.

If the machine tool is to be shared, it is necessary to build a bridge between the machine owner and the machine user, so as to transfer the productivity of idle machine tools to the machine users. But problem arises: if the transfer of the idle machine tool is right, such as machine tools, transportation, installation, debugging is a big problem; Especially, it is only about transferring the right to use, but also involves a recycling problem. How can the cost of transportation be apportioned reasonably? How to guarantee the property safety of machine tool? These questions are worth thinking about.

If there is no need for space transfer of machine tools and equipment, that is, in the form of processing on behalf of or workshop leasing, it is not discussed that the form does not meet the requirements of sharing economy. Such a form is not new now. It seems that it is not possible to open up the demand and create value for both parties who share it.

Sharing economy creates user value for bilateral users, which can not only reduce costs for users, but also create idle goods value for owners. In addition, it has massive value, because it focuses on the idle resources of the whole society, the volume it can reach is incomparable to the self-employed leasing economy.

Therefore, the sharing of machine tools is not not impossible, but there is not a mature platform, conditions and opportunities. However, with the rapid increase of small batch, customized and personalized demand, it will create conditions for machine tool sharing. Maybe in the future, ordinary processing enthusiasts/designers/small entrepreneurs can also make their own customized products by sharing machine tools, so that the machine tool, a cold and ice-free big guy, can enter the life of ordinary people.