Failure modes from the perspective of safety functions

In modern trade activities, open quotations and clear price tags are the basic trade rules. From aircraft and cars to food and digital products, manufacturers will give clear price logos to facilitate buyers to understand prices, especially in today's Internet. With the development of the Internet, many products can be searched for public prices on the Internet. However, my country's machine tool industry does not abide by this code. Machine tool manufacturers rarely make public quotations. At most, they only give a rough price range. Most of them adopt the "price negotiation" method. Why?

In fact, most of the special rules are bred by special soil. The phenomenon that the machine tool industry does not publicly quote prices to the society is caused by the special domestic market environment.

Special marketing mechanism

In China, both foreign companies and domestic machine tool manufacturers generally adopt the marketing model of direct sales and intermediate agent sales, among which agents account for a large proportion of sales. Machine tool manufacturers generally give the agent a bottom price, and the selling price is determined by the agent itself. However, a machine tool manufacturer does not only have one agent, but has multiple agents at the same time, so conflicts arise.

Each agent will set prices according to its own specific circumstances. If the price is disclosed, the prices of the same product will vary. The price with a lower price will inevitably have an advantage over the price with a higher price, and the customer may be snatched away by others. As a result, the agent tacitly unified his actions and chose not to disclose the quotation of machine tool products. Similarly, if agents do not quote, it will be difficult for direct sales manufacturers to disclose their prices.

avoid price wars

In ancient times, there was a trading method called "swallowing gold in your sleeve". The purpose of the two people bargaining down their sleeves is to avoid the eyes and ears of their peers and avoid price wars among peers.

Part of the reason why machine tool companies do not publicly quote is to avoid price wars. The competition among manufacturing companies in my country is very fierce. In order to gain a more user base, many manufacturers will reduce prices and sell their own products to fight a price war. However, the situation in the machine tool industry is different. You know, although machine tools are expensive, the actual profits are very low. Even some international giants maintain low profits every year. Under such circumstances, once a price war is fought, the damage to the company will be very serious. Therefore, in order to avoid price wars among similar products, machine tool manufacturers have chosen not to disclose prices to the public.

In addition, due to the individual needs of users, the selection of machine tools is too flexible. In the configuration of the machine tool, such as design, CNC system, spindle, guide rail, turning tool, tip, drill bit, fine parts and other parts, users can freely select and customize them individually. Too flexible options also lead to huge differences in the price of the same model of machine tools, and manufacturers cannot give standard prices.

It is the above reasons that have led to the phenomenon of unclear price tags in the machine tool industry. From the perspective of machine tool manufacturers, non-public quotations may be more suitable for the specific situation of current industry development. However, from the perspective of consumers, the lack of public prices will undoubtedly suffer consumers. Many buyers have to inquire about prices one by one, which will also lead to some shortcomings of confusing fish and hidden tricks. Therefore, I hope that the development of the machine tool industry will get better and better in the future, and more and more companies will be able to publicly quote and clearly mark prices in a healthier market environment.