VIEWS ON DOMESTIC CAR SEAT INTERIOR MATERIAL

After China's entry into WTO, the competition of automobile seats and decorative material products gradually focus on the fairness and non-regional protection in term of price, service and quality. Foreign companies like Johnson Controls, Lear Corporation strengthened their cooperation with our domestic giants, which put more pressure on other companies in this industry. In facing of opportunities and challenges, we have several views about the production, infrastructures and applications of automobile seats interior materials, which combining the situation of domestic automobile seat interior decoration material and the analysis and prediction of the international and domestic markets.

The Characteristics And Application Status Of Car Seat Interior Material

Since 1988, the originally dominated situation of domestic artificial leather has been broken by the gradual rise of Sino - foreign joint venture automobile factories. Our domestic fabric manufacturers imitating the development and application aboard happened on the automobile factories in Shanghai, Changchun, Tianjin and etc. in the beginning. Due to the texture of fabric is better, also its air permeability, flame resistance and other physical indicators are superior to artificial leather, therefore, most of our automobile factories started to choose fabric as the car seat interior material since 1990.

Now the big problem in this industry is that there being many overseas duplications and imitations, especially in automobiles. Since the vehicle types are imported from abroad, which means that the intellectual property right belonging to the foreign party. What's more, there are thousands of differences on the producing facilities, purchasing raw materials and craft routes with extremely high internally technical standard requirements. So it is very difficult in development and production. Generally, the cost of imitation as the incoming samples abroad is 1/3 of the original one only. It's really hard to develop and produce based on such low cost for those car interior material manufacturers with single equipment. And there's no any industry unified standards can be referred to , they mostly refer to the international standards currently , such as the flame resistant rating, color fastness, sunlight fastness , smell, etc..

Actually, there are variety types of automobile materials but small batches, and most of types can't form batch production, let alone reach the scale benefit. While many large chemical fiber corporations as the suppliers of raw material are unable to undertake the risks with the automobile material manufacturers together.

Oversupply Present On The Competition Of Car Seat Interior Material Industry

On the background of yearly recession for the textile industry, many large foreign automobile manufacturers have come to China to set up joint venture factories in recent years. In addition, some domestic textile manufacturers totally or partly changing production direction result from the government's investment and positive support in part areas, some of them even just separate the workshop of fabric internally. Meanwhile, some interior material manufacturers in Taiwan also have joined this competition. 

So far, there are around 60 interior material manufacturers with different scale in whole China. Therefore, the producing capacity is far over demand. However, the 80% of share taken by the roof, seat belts and car mat, which being merely supplied from 5 to 10 manufacturers. And the core producing place of seat belts and car mat is in Shanghai.

Malignant Price Pressure, No Ability To Develop

In these years, the automobile manufacturers fiercely competing on price affect on the interior material manufacturers, as the result of a chain reaction. Consequently, they force down price regardless of cost as their overcapacity, even selling part of products lower than the cost.

As the current situation, our domestic enterprises must learn from foreign advanced enterprises to implement the union of common development. We need to ensure the quality and play our respective advantages on the basic of determining the market direction of our own products for expanding the market. Because the automobile industry is also bound to take this road of vertical and horizontal integration. 

The Production And Application Of Car Seat Interior Material Abroad

Here are several characteristics for the car seat interior material manufacturers and raw material manufacturers abroad as below,

Firstly, simple designs and big scale.Generally, the interior material manufacturers abroad equip with more than 100 or over 200 same type of facility, such as KTMS，Suminoe Textile, United States c011indaikman, etc., therefore, they have unique products characteristics.

Secondly, scale and specialization in raw material suppliers. Each of their raw material supplier have their own specialty and characteristic raw materials with high technical and quality requirements to ensure the batch production.

Thirdly, stable quality ensured.

Due to they can ensure nearly zero color difference in each of large batch lot for the same item and keep perfect no matter on the texture, hand feeling or the technical requirements, therefore, the price is hardly lower than RMB100/m. And they only use the handmade and top-end material in the interior of real luxury cars rather than the natural leather. According to statistics, the textile fabric is used in more than 95% of car seats.

However, we generally use some poor artificial leather in the interior of cars whose quality even worse than the textile fabric, especially in the air permeability and durability. In a word, the car seat interior material with high quality will become a very attractive industry as the booming development of automobile industry. It has a brilliant market perspective not only in China, but also a greater one abroad. Our domestic enterprises can only achieve the goal of occupying the international and domestic markets by adopting the strategy of "Producing volume more than profit, winning by export. Common development on production and management in the same industry and across industries. Learning others' strengths and make up for own deficiencies".