A Chinese producer’s bittersweet bite of innovation: losses in recent years

If innovation can be compared to an apple, the latest bite taken by Shenyang Machine Tool Group, once the world’s largest machine tool seller, was not the sweetest. Although its self-developed smart factory machinery tools have created new demand, a lot more has to be done to steer the group towards a path of quality and sustainable development in the new era. On the wall of one of the group’s conference halls hangs a calligraphy showing four Chinese characters “da gan kuai shang”, which means make all-out efforts and launch new projects as fast as possible. The company has reported losses for more than two years. It forecast that the loss in the first nine months of this year will be between 750 million and 800 million yuan, compared with a loss of 798 million yuan for the same period of 2016. The losses in recent years came as China’s economic growth slowed to medium-high rates. Gai Liya, manager of a production line of the group’s Shenzhen-listed branch, Shenyang Machine Tool Group said “Technological innovation should be a lasting process. We still need to make constant experiments and huge inputs in the future”.