Who produces machine tools?

The machine tool industry is heavily concentrated geographically. A handful of countries located in Western Europe and East Asia account for almost all the global exports, Germany and Japan being the world’s two undisputed leaders. Considering that the machine tool industry provides the production base for all the other manufacturing industries, including the military, the vast quantitative and qualitative regional disparities in machine tool production have far-reaching strategic consequences.

Figure 1. Global distribution of machine tool exporters, 2019 ^[1]

The machine tool production is a knowledge intensive industry, more demanding in terms of technology and qualified labor than most manufacturing industries. As it is based on mature mechanical engineering competences and on innovative digital control technology, the old industrial powers which managed to adapt to recent disruptive changes in technology play a disproportionate role in the machine tool production.