The characteristics of the industry are obvious, mainly small and medium-sized enterprises

China’s instrumentation industry lacks international leading enterprises similar to Thermo Fei, Shimadzu, Roche, Fluke, etc., and the economic operation of the industry is dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises. In recent years, the United States “Chemical and Engineering News” magazine (C&EN) has published a list of the top 20 global instrument companies by sales every year, but there is no Chinese PMA323BE company on the list. In 2019, there were 4,451 enterprises above designated size in the instrumentation industry, with a total main business income of 724.264 billion yuan (for comparison, Huawei’s operating income in 2019 was 858.833 billion yuan). Among them, the annual operating income of more than 5 billion yuan of enterprises are rare.

There are serious structural contradictions within the industry. According to customs statistics, in 2019, the total value of China’s imports of instruments and instruments was 51.993 billion US dollars, the total value of exports was 33.838 billion US dollars, and the import and export deficit reached 18.155 billion US dollars. According to the classification basis of the industry association, the whole industry only supplies four sub-industries with measuring instruments, weighing instruments, drawing calculation and measuring instruments, and special instruments for geodetic mapping for surplus, and the industry has low-end (such as PMA323BE electricity meters, water meters, gas meters) overcapacity and high-end capacity (such as large scientific instruments) insufficient problems. Combined with industry revenue scale, it can be further rough calculated that China’s domestic market demand in 2019 is about 849.506 billion yuan (main business income + import and export deficit), and the proportion of domestic self-sufficiency is about 57.78%. The above data also shows that although foreign enterprises only occupy about 42.22% of the domestic market share, foreign enterprises mainly occupy the high-profit precision optical instruments, analytical instruments, laboratory instruments and medical instruments and other high-end markets.

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1.2.3 Low industry popularity and lack of enterprise talents

The main counterpart talents in the instrument and meter industry are precision instruments and machinery, test and measurement technology and instruments (undergraduate majors are measurement and control technology and instruments). An employment platform counted 333 employment samples for measurement and control technology and instrumentation majors, and the data showed that only 26% of jobs went to instrumentation or industrial automation industries. Taking the Department of Precision Instrumentation of Tsinghua University as an example, the department signed a tripartite agreement in 2018 to employ a total of 55 people, most of whom went to scientific research and technical services, software and information technology services, large and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises and military units, and only less than PMA323BE 10% of graduates went to instrumentation enterprises. This is closely related to the salary level of the instrumentation industry and the huge life pressure faced by graduates at this stage.

Not only the employment situation of the corresponding professional graduates to the industry is not optimistic, but also the lack of innovative talents in enterprises is a common problem. We closely tracked a number of projects under the national key research and development program “Major scientific instrument and Equipment development”, and we learned that the number of senior titles participating in the project of the leading enterprises accounted for less than 10% of the total number of projects, considering that these enterprises have represented the higher technical level of domestic instrument development. The proportion of senior talents of the overall employees of the industry enterprises will be far less than 10%. The structure of technological innovation human resources in China’s scientific instrument industry is characterized by the proportion of R & D personnel and software developers in the enterprise employees is higher than that of the United States, Germany and other countries, but the proportion of highly educated practitioners and technical support personnel is relatively insufficient, and there are more software developers, which is likely to mean that there is a large shortage of instrument hardware product development capabilities.