Chinese Engine Development
- Thread starter jackbh
- Start date
regarding this table of the WS-15, WS-19 market share & numbers, I'll throw this quite optimistic theory here, assuming this data is true, what if by market share they don't mean just this company's share of the total number of WS-15/WS-19 but instead they mean the total number of the WS-15 & 19 as a share of all the types of engines produced specificaly for the J-20 /J-31 (ie: for the ease of numbers let's say in 2020 China produced a total of 80 engines for the J-20/J31, in this case 16 [20%] of these engines would be WS-15 & WS-19 & this particular factor/company or whatever that published the document will produce a total of 8 out of the 16 WS-15/WS-19 projected in that year, similarily in 2026 let's assume the entire China [not just CISRI-Gaona] produced a total of 120 engines for the J-20/J-31, in this case 60 [50%] of those would be WS-15/WS-19 & CISRI-Gaona will be producing 8 out of those 60 WS-15/WS-19 engines).
PS: I haven't been following Chinese engine development, this theory is not based on any proof & I have no idea what the documents are supposed to represent since I don't understand Chinese, I'm just saying this so that what I said doesn't get quoted as being a proven leak or something.
PS: I haven't been following Chinese engine development, this theory is not based on any proof & I have no idea what the documents are supposed to represent since I don't understand Chinese, I'm just saying this so that what I said doesn't get quoted as being a proven leak or something.
A very optimistic take. I'd like to believe that too.
But my doubts are different.
What exactly is Hebei Cisri Dekai Technology Co. Ltd. supplying the Shenyang Liming Engine Factory ?
Seems to me...there are other suppliers alongside Hebei Cisri Dekai...
My understanding are:
1: The company makes support structures of the engine, in this specific case it is the casing.
2: The company is subsidiary of CISRI (China Iron Steel Research Institute), from a report of VIP visit, it was claimed to be major in components for aero and space engine (80% in China). But that also means it is not the only.
3: The market share is a mystery. Probably means they don't expect to get all jobs? After all they are not the only, nor would the WS-15 program rely on sole supplier as risk avoidance measure.
- IMO, the reducing is reasonable for pre-production when the purpose is to reduce fabrication variables (to standardize everything). Every piece or batch in this phase is NOT standard/final, along the progress there will be less and less variants to try. At the end one only need ONE piece which full-fill every specification and pass through a settled fabrication procedure.
One more thought:
CISRI is ONLY responsible for engine casing according to this report. Their job is to settle the manufacturing procedure and specification to make engine casing uniform, that is the last batch of engine casing is same in size, measurement and strength etc using the same procedure. The numbers are their expectations to achieve this goal. The numbers do not represent the full picture of the whole engine manufacturing procedure reaching its goal. We can use it as a reference, but not determination.
CISRI is ONLY responsible for engine casing according to this report. Their job is to settle the manufacturing procedure and specification to make engine casing uniform, that is the last batch of engine casing is same in size, measurement and strength etc using the same procedure. The numbers are their expectations to achieve this goal. The numbers do not represent the full picture of the whole engine manufacturing procedure reaching its goal. We can use it as a reference, but not determination.
Yep, this was my original point about market share relative to other suppliers. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that the marketshare figures have no mathematical relationship to the production output projections, and has everything to do with where CISRI thinks it will be in terms of competing with other suppliers for the share of those fixed outputs. After spending time to read the whole document, there’s nothing I saw that would specify how those marketshare figures should be interpreted. However, keep in mind that the objective of the document is to report on and sell CISRI’s future prospects for the part of the business they supply to the final assembler, not to document production output for the final assembler themselves, and thus it would make sense to interpret figures like market share as about their position relative to other suppliers, not as a figure related to total output of engines.
Even if the market share only has to do with where CSRI thinks it will be in terms of competing with other suppliers, that doesn't really make sense, because in 2020 if producing 5 WS-15s is meant to represent "20%" of market share relative to competitors and if producing 5 WS-15s (the same number) in 2026 is meant to represent "50%" of overall market share relative to competitors.... then that means in 2020 overall it means they are projecting there would be 25 WS-15s produced in 2020 and only 10 produced in 2026.
The table as it is just doesn't make sense, because if production of engines is fixed every year between 2020 and 2026, yet CISRI's "market share" increases from 20% to 50%, then the only way that would make sense is if the overall market size has shrunk! I consider that to be rather unlikely.
This part is what I'm struggling to reconcile.
Each year the number of actual WS-15s and WS-19s is constant between 2020 and 2026. That is to say, the product that the value is supplying between each of these years are not suggested to be changing in any way.
However, the market share of this company is increasing from 20% to 50%, despite not changing in any way.
(Keeping in mind the "market" here is AVIC/PLA's demand for WS-15 and WS-19 engines)
If we assume the numbers in the table are accurate, then it has to mean that the overall market size of engines is reducing -- i.e.: that AVIC/PLA is requiring less WS-15 and WS-19 engines. Now, it is possible that perhaps the AVIC/PLA are choosing to be conservative with WS-15 and WS-19 engines for some reason, or perhaps AVIC/PLA foresee some kind of massive spending crunch in the future.... however I find that to be very unlikely.
Either we are missing something, or at least one of the rows in that table is inaccurate... or both.
It’s not producing 20% of WS-15, but 20% of supply for specific parts used on the WS-15. The supply of the part is not the same thing as the production output of the engine. Those don’t always scale linearly. Furthermore, as I said earlier, the marketshare figure may have nothing to do with the total production output for the engine. Perhaps the output is fixed, and the share refers to how much of specific parts procured for the 5 engines the supplier anticipates they will cover.
The reducing is the XWS-15 and XWS-19, not serial production of WS-15 and WS-19. I use X to designate the test-production variant. These engines from 2020 to 2026 are NOT production articles, every batch of them are slightly different with later batches being closer to the final articles for mass productions. It is natural to expect that the divination being reduced, so the number of test articles being reduced in total. At the end of the phase, only the last batch (say 5 in 2026) would be identical to the version in mass production. Most early makes of these engines are not going to be used by J-20.
Let me illustrate in total numbers. In 2020 the total is 15, if 5 as a batch, there will be 3 batches. I will make 3 batches in sequence. The first batch results to deviation that only 2 is up to spec, I will improve my process and make 2nd batch which results 3 good, so by the 3rd batch I may get 4 good. That means out of 15 in 2020, I have improved my process to make a batch (5) of quality 80%. That is not good enough, so I start another batch of 5 in 2021. Do I still need 15? Probably not because now I have a much higher baseline. If everything goes smoothly, I may only need 2 batches to reach 5/5 where I can settle my process.
This is to illustrate how pre-production development are planned. How they spread out these numbers (size of batches and number of batches) are dependent on their R&D methodology, but the overall trend is gradual reduction of total articles until the last batch.