The national industry standard for the cross-opening rate of door locks is ≤ 0.204%. However, in this sampling test, 17 groups of products failed to meet the cross-opening rate standard, accounting for 34.7%. The cross-opening rate of some products was as high as 0.979%. Secondly, the length of the lock tongue. The length of the lock tongue is another important indicator of lock security. The national standard stipulates that the length of the double-tongue plug core door lock should be no less than 12 millimeters, and the slanting tongue should be no less than 11 millimeters. This investigation found that 6 groups of products had a slanting tongue length that did not meet the standard. Thirdly, the axial static load of the square tongue of the plug core door lock. This is an important indicator of lock stability. The national standard requires that the square tongue can still be used after bearing 1000 Newtons of static load on its end face. However, some enterprises have not reached this basic index.
The main reasons for the quality issues of lock products are threefold: First is management. Currently, the management level of domestic lock consumption enterprises is uneven. Large enterprises can strictly follow the standards to produce qualified and relatively stable quality products, but some small and medium-sized enterprises often ignore quality management. The production process basically lacks a scientific technological process and effective testing methods; Second is the process. Process management plays an extremely important role in ensuring the quality of lock products. Backward production processes are one of the main reasons for the decline in the quality of lock products; Third is low personnel quality. Some enterprises do not have relevant technical personnel, and the cultural level of production workers is low, making it difficult to discover quality problems during the production process.
According to reports, since the reform and opening up for 30 years, the scale of our country's lock-making industry has continued to expand, giving rise to a number of well-known enterprises, such as Yantai Sanhuan Lock Group Co., Ltd., Wenzhou General Lock Co., Ltd., Pujiang Plum Blossom Lock Group Co., Ltd., Zhongshan Huafeng Lock Co., Ltd., etc. The comprehensive competitiveness of the entire industry has been continuously strengthened. In recent years, driven by domestic and international market demand, our country's lock-making industry has shown a trend of rapid growth. The total sales of the entire industry is about 40 billion yuan, with a production volume of 1.9 billion locks. According to customs data statistics, the average annual export growth rate of the lock-making industry during the [Eleventh Five-Year Plan] period reached 31%, which is twice the average speed of the entire hardware industry. In the first half of this year, China's lock exports amounted to 2.082 billion US dollars, an increase of 15.9% compared to the same period last year. Currently, China has become the largest producer and consumer of lock products globally.
However, due to extensive development, unreasonable enterprise scale structure, and prominent homogenization of export-oriented products, although the export of building materials commodities in China reached 24.2 billion US dollars in 2011, an increase of 25% over 2010, the rapid development of the domestic lock industry has revealed a concentrated production situation where individual scales are small. This has become a bottleneck restricting the leapfrog development of the industry. Shi Senglan said that currently, the number of enterprises in major lock production areas such as Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Shandong is quite impressive, but the number of true leading enterprises is still small, and their advantages in market share occupation are not significant. This small, numerous, and weak enterprise structure directly leads to low resource utilization rates, backward technology, low product added value, and poor economic benefits across the entire industry. For this reason, at present, the high-end domestic lock market is occupied by foreign enterprises and brands; domestic enterprises exporting large quantities of products through OEM methods gain little profit and sometimes have to face trade barriers such as anti-dumping.
At this lock product quality analysis meeting, participants unanimously believed that with social progress and continuous improvement in people's living standards, the connotation of lock products has been continuously expanded due to the application of new technologies and materials. For example, the application of electromechanical integrated smart locks, fingerprint locks developed using the most advanced biometric recognition technology, and special locks developed for vaults, offshore transportation, military police use, etc. Therefore, there is still much room for domestic locks to develop, and the key lies in achieving continuous improvement and transcendence in future development.