More than 80% of the country’s lenses come from it: why Danyang?

Danyang's glasses are all over the place
From the high-speed railway Danyang station, diagonally across the road is danyang Glasses City. Just like Yiwu, which is famous for producing small commodities, takes small commodities city as the connection between mass consumers and industry, Danyang Glasses City is the section of the observation lens industry.
Danyang Glasses City has a visitor center, which is a real tourist attraction of the county. Into the glasses city, a casual shop, even if the area is small, all around the walls of the dense code of all kinds of sunglasses, optical glasses, like the vast sea of glasses, even impossible to choose. A local said, "Shops hire people to wait in the square of Danyang Station and ask passengers if they have glasses as soon as they get out of the station. It's a way to bring customers into the store and increase sales."

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Danyang Eyeglasses City is not only a market for cheap eyeglasses, but also a hub of China's eyeglasses industry. A pair of glasses subdivided down is actually frame, lens and fitting three completely different industries. In China's superfab, regional and class stratification has been formed.

The mirror frame industry is distributed in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, among which OEM factories of luxury brands like Kering group are concentrated in Dongguan and Shenzhen, and a mature industrial chain has been formed from design to production. Low-grade glasses are worn centrally in Wenzhou area. The lens industry is mainly in Danyang. Assembly is to consider the purchase and inventory, compared with the spectacle frame as diverse as fashion style, lens a degree is a SKU (inventory unit), so, between the lens frame and lens, assembly is easier to keep close to the lens industry.

More than 80% of China's eyeglasses, more than 50% of the world's eyeglasses are produced in Danyang, whether the Shenzhen frame, Wenzhou frame, or the local production of danyang frame also flow to Danyang, equipped, and then sent to eyeglasses shops and consumers around the world.

Danyang Eyeglass City is the iceberg on the surface of the eyeglass industry, with thousands of large and small factories and workshops below the surface. A local said, "In Danyang, if you pull anyone from the street, you can ask him for a pair of glasses. There must be someone in his circle of friends who are in the eyewear industry, either him, his relatives, neighbours or friends." Walk around the town of Situ, where danyang lens industry is concentrated, you will know that this sentence is no exaggeration.

The local people had their own courtyards and built three or four stories houses, and half of the area of the houses or the bungalows opposite them were optician workshops. Stu has been making glasses since the days when houses were rural. Some make mold, some make lens, all are small workshops. Danyang's lens culture is formed from this kind of rough. There are a lot of families around me. There are six people, grandpa and grandma, dad and mom, son and daughter-in-law. Grandpa and grandma make dyeing, dad and mom make lens frame, son and daughter-in-law make e-commerce customer clothing and accessories. Some of them open taobao stores, and sell glasses on Amazon in the United States and Rakuten in Japan. Sell dozens of pairs every month, income is not bad, or even quite considerable.

Frames and lenses are typically labor-intensive industries facing rising labor costs and hiring difficulties at home, and recently on the list of TAX increases in the United States. Under the double pressure, it makes people wonder whether the lens industry in Danyang can still enjoy a huge market share as before. Having grown from a family workshop, the lens Industrial Park in Stu is relatively new, with new roads, new factories and corporate offices, compared with industrial parks like dongguan's. Will those firms stay in the region, or move to south-east Asia or India, where Labour costs are lower, as the consensus suggests?

Workers' skills are the core competitiveness
For all the talk of offshoring manufacturing, the lens world is still talking warily about its future. This attitude is related to the industry characteristics of lens production. Although it is a typical labor-intensive industry, which can determine the success or failure and profit of a factory, it is not only a mathematical problem to save labor costs. Having the strength to deliver on time and the management ability to improve the pass rate is the key to getting orders, and only with orders can profits be generated. OEM factories to fight price, fight quality, fight delivery time.

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The easiest way to increase productivity and stabilize output is to replace people with machines, which is hard to do. It is not that technology research and development can not be achieved, but an economic account. The lens and frame industry is tiny compared to industries like pharmaceuticals and automobiles, which are highly automated. Since there are a lot of hand-made lenses so far, there is not much technology. Roughly speaking, the mold is prepared according to the requirements of the order, the liquid raw material of the resin lens is injected into the mold, baked dry, and then coating and other processes are completed according to the needs. The injection of raw materials is one of the most delicate processes in lens production and currently requires manual operation. A delicate faucet is installed at each workstation, and workers push buttons to inject liquid raw materials into molds. This seemingly simple movement requires a month or two of training, because the hand needs to be steady and the mind needs to know how much mold to fill to decide when to raise the hand. Skilled workers can do like machine control at one go, raw materials just fill, but if not skilled, easy to form bubbles, the lens is invalid.

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The process looks simple, but the people are complicated, and it is not easy to have hundreds of workers sit at the operating table all day long to steadily execute these fine processes, from novice to skilled, according to standardized procedures.

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Post time: Jun-23-2022