The coatings industry is showing new ways of fighting

China Coatings Network
News: About China's
coatings
over the past 20 years of industrial growth miracle, a fairly popular explanation is that China's paint industry has implemented a "comparative advantage strategy", fully play their own "comparative advantage", that is, cheap labor and raw material resources and other traditional comparative advantages.
careful observation or can be found that the situation of contemporary China's paint industry, can be described as a comparative advantage, defeat is also a comparative advantage. The serious imbalance of industrial structure and product structure also seems to lead to the strategy of comparative advantage. In this 10 million tons of paint sales, 90% of its revenue comes from domestic sales, and foreign paint giant enterprises accounted for nearly 45% of China's
paint
paint market, and almost monopolized the high-end products market, especially in the
industrial coatings
field, but also make domestic enterprises difficult to compete. At the same time,
in recent years, the world's paint giants also with strong capital, mature technology, strong brand influence and advanced management and other new competitive advantages, everywhere in China to expand the circle, firmly occupy the Chinese market, the domestic
pon coatings enterprises
are crowded out, profit margins are constantly compressed, is now struggling. It can be said that today, I am afraid it is time for a thorough rethinking of the comparative advantage strategy.
, traditional comparative advantage may become a disadvantage in the rapid development of science and technology today. Among them, "China's paint country" Shunde is so.
In 1978, through the spring breeze of reform and opening up, Shunde coating realized the gorgeous turn from "Sanji fish pond" to "paint kingdom", which benefited from "low cost of raw materials, low cost of human resources, low cost of land, low cost of environmental pollution" and many other comparative advantages. However, former Shunde government officials developed and constituted a systematic comparative advantage strategy, and under the guidance of this strategy, Shunde paint industry with the "barbaric" traces have become a thing of the past. Compared with Shunde 30 years ago, now, a more perfect market has been formed. In recent years, with the land, water, electricity, human resources costs continue to rise, resulting in the development of the current Shunde coating industry has gradually appeared bottlenecks. This led to Shunde coatings continue to accelerate the pace of industrial transfer, after several years, finally began to bear fruit.
, not only Shunde coatings, but also paint companies in other parts of the country. In recent years, coating enterprises, especially small and medium-sized coating enterprises, face serious challenges such as rising factor costs and compression of profit margins. Many enterprises increase operating costs, management costs increase, labor costs continue to increase, factors of production prices continue to rise, employment pressure increased, the financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises further increased, coupled with the industry's own industrial structure, independent innovation and talent shortage and other major contradictions have not been fundamentally resolved. These outstanding problems and contradictions have brought constraints to the healthy development of the coating industry.
, of course, there are also government policies. From the point of view of national strategy, the implementation of comparative advantage strategy can make the labor force fully employed. As the economy grows, the labor force becomes relatively scarce, and wages can rise, benefiting from economic growth.
, comparative advantage strategies can achieve the unity of equity and efficiency. "For every enterprise in society as a whole to be able to respond correctly to comparative advantage when making technological and industrial choices, a factor price structure that reflects the relative scarcity of factors of production is required."
" and "the relative scarcity of factors in the factor price structure of the accurate reflection, is bound to be the result of market competition, no man-made intervention and planning mechanism can do this." "The authorities point out that the comparative advantage strategies of The Four Dragons of Japan and Asia have been successful because they are "implementing a market economy". The policy conclusion is very clear: in terms of the implementation of comparative advantage strategy, "the role of government is first and foremost to maintain the competitiveness and rules of the market." However
from the current pressure faced by paint companies, whether it is the rise in raw material prices or rising labor costs, it is highlighted that industrial development is based on traditional comparative advantages. In the past, coating enterprises rely on traditional comparative advantages, and gradually realize capital accumulation, but with the changes of the times, the traditional comparative advantages of the past have gradually been replaced by technology, capital, brand, management and other new competitive advantages, and local paint enterprises because there is no "comparative advantage" period, lay the foundation to achieve technology, capital, brand and other new competitive advantages, so now more and more development bottlenecks. Therefore, it is time for us to re-examine the traditional comparative advantages of the paint industry in the past.
, it is important to recognize that comparative advantage strategies are universally applicable within a country and that their applicability worldwide is conditional. Specific to China's different industries, in which the paint industry needs to play a comparative advantage, to achieve capital accumulation, development and the establishment of a unified national market; But in the face of worldwide competition, if we open our minds to the world to play the traditional comparative advantage, we can only make paint - cheap labor is what we call comparative advantage. For a period of time, the paint manufacturing industry lack of competitiveness or competitiveness decline, probably with us to play the traditional comparative advantage is not untested. Although this comparative advantage has enabled us to promote the development of the industry to a certain extent for some time, various disadvantages have been exposed in the financial crisis and economic environment changes. Guangdong's former provincial party secretary once pointed out: "The current financial crisis has taught Guangdong a vivid lesson, in the past to use cheap land, human capital advantages, to undertake international industrial transfer and development of labor-intensive industries, its low-end production capacity in the impact of the financial crisis under the deep-seated contradictions exposed." "If we interpret this sentence from the perspective of the development of the paint industry, we can see that some of the past practices are still of practical significance, that is, to play the advantages of cheap land, human capital, to form the competitiveness of the current paint industry.
, the choice of industrial growth model should pay attention to the rapid development of science and technology background. To recognize that in the static, traditional comparative advantage strategy within the framework of the advantages, in the dynamic state is precisely the disadvantage, such as cheap labor, another point of view may be the quality of labor force is not high, labor cost-effective is not high, innovation ability is not strong; The other side of the rapid development of low-end industries is low added value, lack of independent intellectual property rights and international brands, environmental pollution. If in the initial stage of the development of the coating industry, we rely on the traditional comparative advantage to complete the necessary accumulation, then in the industry has a certain degree of development today, we should step up the transformation of industrial growth model, improve the technical content of industrial growth, to avoid falling into the trap of comparative advantage. There are concerns that changing the industrial growth model will create problems and contradictions, but if not, the sustainable and healthy development of the industry may not be guaranteed.
Refore, from the examination, China's coating industry needs to bid farewell to the traditional "comparative advantage" and establish a new competitive advantage, which needs to be concentrated in technology, capital, brand, management and even services. However, it is gratifying to note that in recent years, we have seen a large number of domestic national paint enterprises such as Hongchang Chemical,
Than Tree
, Carberry, Bards, Yangtze River, Lighthouse, Mei Tus, Dabao Chemical, Zhanchen, Shuanghu and other domestic national paint enterprises gradually strengthen technology research and development, take the road of independent innovation; At the same time, in the relatively rich labor resources and lack of capital conditions, three trees, Jiabao, Mattel and other large enterprises not only gradually become big brand influence, but also began to actively seek the road of capital expansion through listing, the enterprise bigger and stronger ... I believe that with the further deepening of industrial development, we can also re-establish a new competitive advantage, for China's paint industry gradually become strong to lay the foundation.