Sales of low-voltage motor drives in China were estimated to be worth $1.7 million in 2008, a growth of about 8.3% over 2007, according to the latest statistics from IMS Research (www.imsresearch.com).
The China drives market is heavily dependent on machine builders, with sales to this channel representing almost two-thirds of total market revenues in 2007.
Some major suppliers started to worry about the market in the first half of 2008 before the global economic crisis started because of the sharp decline of the demand from the textile machinery sector, which accounted for 25% of the total shipment in terms of units, according to IMS.
Analyst Jackey Wang commented: “The slowdown or even decline of some machinery sectors did decelerate the growth of sales to machine builders significantly in the second half of 2008. However, the impact of the global financial crisis on end-user markets was insignificant until now. Sales to end-user markets continued growing as a result of the government-guided energy-saving and omission-reduction projects and related policies. The fast growth in end-user markets offset the slowdown of the machinery market.”
In 2005, the Chinese government announced an ambitious goal of reducing energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20% between 2005 and 2010.
