Corn Harvest Season Arrives, Manufacturers Face a Major Test
The busy “three autumns” season is approaching. Right now, the most anxious are probably the specialized corn harvester manufacturers and their dealers. For most corn machinery companies, this year they will likely fail to meet their established sales plans.
In the Huang-Huai-Hai region and Central Plains market, where two-row and three-row corn harvesters are sold on a large scale, the phenomenon of users buying machines in groups seen in recent years is no longer visible. Driven by the purchase subsidy policy, the corn harvester market, after four or five years of rapid development, has gradually approached a development bottleneck period. On the one hand, corn harvesters are rapidly becoming popular and the level of mechanized corn harvesting has significantly improved; on the other hand, many regions have seen market capacity prematurely overdrawn. Moreover, the concentration of the corn harvester market remains low. According to incomplete statistics, the number of corn harvester manufacturers currently still exceeds 100.
Compared with the nearly saturated wheat and rice harvesting machinery and tractor markets, the corn machinery market, which still has enormous social demand, is a typical policy-driven market, and farmers are more motivated to buy under subsidy guidance. This year, however, many provinces have tilted purchase subsidies toward deep loosening operations and straw returning to the field, so the funds available for corn machinery are clearly less than in previous years.
⟦NL> A greater concern comes from the impact of the upgrading of agricultural engine emission standards from “National II” to “National III”, which the entire industry is currently watching closely. Since after April 1 next year “National II” products will no longer be allowed to be sold, agricultural machinery companies generally have a psychological panic about whether products equipped with “National II” engines can still enjoy subsidies by then. In addition, “National III” engines cost nearly 10,000 yuan more on the one hand, and on the other hand there are variables in the reliability of the “National III” engine products themselves and the matching complete machines, so dealers also dare not stock up in large quantities or promote them to farmers with a price difference.
Under the situation of little or even no subsidy funds, two-row corn machines, because of their lower total price, may still be purchased by users in need even without subsidies, so the market is affected relatively less. Large corn machines, especially products of four rows or more, are naturally affected much more, and some farmers who are unsure about applying for subsidies may postpone their purchase to the next year.
In my view, the explosive growth period of the corn harvester market has passed, and this year will be a year of accelerated reshuffling for corn machinery companies. Companies that solely produce corn harvesters will face even more brutal tests, while for large agricultural machinery manufacturers with diversified products such as Foton Lovol, Zoomlion, and Shandong Shifeng, the overall impact is relatively small. In addition, for companies like Yongmeng Machinery that have achieved brand status in the large corn harvester market in Northeast China, market pressure is also much smaller. This also illustrates a principle: as long as the product is excellent and one becomes a true “expert” in a certain segmented field, one can certainly withstand the test of the market.