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Japanese mold technology revolutionizing the mold industry

The mold industry in Japan, an advanced country in the mold industry, is also at a point of great change. The main causes are the Ukraine crisis and the collapse of the global supply chain (parts supply chain) caused by COVID-19. In addition, the prices of overseas products are rising sharply due to rapid exchange rate fluctuations (decrease in the value of the yen). Until now, Japan's monotsukuri industry has been actively pursuing overseas expansion, riding the trend of globalization. However, the trend began to rapidly reverse, and now the monotsukuri industry that had expanded overseas is showing a tendency to return to Japan. Another factor of change is the change in the automobile industry, which is the most demanded product in the mold industry. As the automobile industry evolves from gasoline cars to electric cars, the number of parts that make up a car will drastically decrease. This trend is expected to increase the demand for small-scale production of a variety of products in the mold industry, and furthermore, it is expected that short delivery times will be required in parts development. As in Korea, the production population working in the mold industry is rapidly decreasing in Japan as well. Even if you add up the total population working in manufacturing in Japan, it only accounts for about 15%. Even in Japan, it is judged that it will be difficult to sustain the monotsukuri industry with this small production population. Therefore, since improvement in production efficiency cannot be expected with the same manual dexterity as before, the mold industry is also demanding the development of mold technology at a different level than before to increase productivity. In this paper, I would like to introduce new Japanese mold technology collected through attending the Intermold exhibition. This is an example of applying a dedicated pin (Gastos) to a mold to prevent an increase in internal pressure during plastic injection molding, and a deep drawing press molding technology with an inherent hydraulic function.