To learn the business situations of spare parts enterprises in a post-pandemic world, their challenges and development plans in a foreseeable future, Wu Jiling, Deputy Director-general of China Sewing Machinery Association (CSMA) and Executive Chairman of Spare Parts Division, together with relevant personnel has paid a visit to seven major spare parts enterprises in Ningbo, i.e. Deying, Yingong, Huayi, Helin, Risheng, Wangye and Zhongdi. The research group has had a productive conversation with the aforementioned companies' management in terms of their operation in the first half of the year and problems they've encountered, and has exchanged opinions on the upcoming growth trend and the development scheme of this sector.

Judging from the research outcome, the production and sales of sewing machine enterprises have gained strong momentum, creating a soaring demand for spare parts as global economies continue to recover and sectors including sewing increase their demand collectively. Since the very beginning of this year, spare parts enterprises have been running overtime at a heavy load. Key players like Deying, Huayi, Yingong have seized the opportunity to expand their production capacities, and have broken the output record set in recent years. Spare parts enterprises have performed very well evidenced by noticeable growth of indicators for sales and profits. Although the growth has slowed down as global pandemic becomes more and more grave in the second half of the year, there are still lots of orders for spare parts due to overall supply chain disruption and sewing machine enterprises' strong willingness to stock up on spare parts. As estimated, spare parts enterprises will be faced with intense production pressure till the end of this year, and they can maintain the high growth rate throughout the year. During the recovery, enterprises have regained their faiths in development, updated their equipment and delivered automation upgrade in a faster pace. Also, they've shown profounder thoughts and planning of high-quality development and its layout.

Against the backdrop of comprehensive resuming of production and sales, fits and starts of the pandemic, and continuous structural changes across the sector, the spare parts industry is also faced with noticeable problems and challenges requiring undivided attention. Firstly, wide-spread difficulties in recruitment. Currently, enterprises are short of labors, and they even cannot find any candidate for key positions, which will result in lingering threats to the spare parts sector in a long run, and make it more urgent to replace manpower with machine; secondly, the cost of manpower and raw material has kept rising while it's hard to raise the price and difficult to transmit the cost, incessantly reducing spare parts enterprises' profitability, and having great impact on their business activities. Besides the cooperation between sewing machine enterprises and spare parts enterprises to create values in a concerted way, the latter shall place emphasis on enhancing their own capacities so as to bear the risks; thirdly, issues like production limits on upstream casting sector due to environment conservation, recruitment disturbance, have inflicted more and more restrictions on the procurement of semi-finished spare parts, which to some extent has upset the healthy development of the supply chain.

During the seminar with spare parts enterprises, Deputy Director-general Wu, with regard to their achievements and difficulties, said that enterprises shall not only focus on production activities, but also pay close attention to the macro situation; they ought to be well prepared for the constant economic fluctuations triggered by the evolving of global pandemic, and conceive forward-looking plans and arrangements; they should put emphasis on the challenges to enterprises' sustainable development posed by difficulties in recruitment, take a multi-pronged approach including replacing manpower with machine, stabilizing the labor team, cultivating corporate culture, incentivizing the employees, etc., increase their investment and innovate the existing mechanism, so as to retain the current staff and attract new talents, build a reliable and trustworthy team; they are supposed to make full use of the opportunities created by industrial structural changes, figure out their exact positioning, transform their mentalities and beliefs of business operation, continuously adapt themselves and determine the most suitable development path for them; they shall also spare no effort to build the irreplaceableness of the sector taking advantage of the favorable resources, and embark on a new journey of high-quality development characterized with professionalism, proficiency, unusualness, novelty and cutting-edge.