Since then, the China market for machine tools has grown at approximately 20 percent annually, while the markets in Germany and most industrial economies have been flat to declining.
This is where competitors such as China, which makes machine-stitched balls, and India have gained ground at Sialkot's expense.
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As a country with a low domestic propensity to consume, China ramped up its export machine to meet that demand.
The number of licenses issued for export of five-axis machine tools to China dropped from nine in 2006 to only three in 2007.
Baker tells me he can make a sock core just as cheaply as anyone in China or Honduras - the machine costs the same, so does the yarn, there's hardly any labor.
"I don't know of another system that is going to be anywhere near the performance and the power of this machine" in China, said Jack Dongarra, a supercomputer expert on the Oak Ridge research staff who is a professor at the University of Tennessee and recently inspected the system in Tianjin last week.
Germany, which supplied China with the high-precision machine tools needed to support its growth, saw its exports boom.
With the rapid industrialization that has occurred in China, it is no surprise that China is now the largest market for machine tools in the world.
As yet, no national standards exist for magnetic stripes and account numbering, so almost all of the 300m or so cards in China are used only as cash-machine or debit cards in the issuing bank's home city.
China has built a very powerful manufacturing industrial machine that will get stronger because of the need to support the increase in internal demand for goods as well as the need to support the continued demands from other countries.
There are six American companies dedicated to producing five-axis machine tools, and at least 20 in China.
Production has been outsourced to China in a bid to keep costs of the bare-bones machine in check.
This is the first time that a CAT machine has been wholly designed, validated and built in China, for the Chinese market.
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Proof of the lesson my Chinese gurus are teaching me: China is fast becoming a consumer economy as well as an export machine.
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China now has 28 companies capable of building more than 1, 000 CNC machine tools.
Chinese washing machine manufacturer Heier sent a technician to a remote agricultural region in China where they had been receiving numerous breakdowns.
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Most of the earth being moved to make way for China's highways, factories and skyscrapers is handled by a fairly simple machine called a wheel loader.
The United States exported 515 five-axis machine tools between 2005-2007, and only 12 of these went to China.
This symbiotic match made in heaven between China and the US consumer worked great as long as housing prices kept rising and the financial machine kept multiplying dollars.
Introduced to tackle machine theft, it has helped turn Komatsu into the biggest foreign supplier of excavators and dump trucks to China's booming construction and mining companies.
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