Today we drove three hours from Yiwu to China’s mold capital — Huangyan, Taizhou. From everyday items like lunch boxes and water bottles to large parts like car bumpers, almost every plastic product starts with a mold here. We visited local suppliers, and found a good-quality mold that cost about 1/4 of the market price.
Now let’s follow our sourcing agent Joe and see what he found inside this mold hub.
China’s Mold City with 4,000+ Suppliers
In China, Guangdong and Zhejiang are both well-known for mold manufacturing, but they serve different types of industries. If you are working with high-precision parts, such as components for electronics, mobile phones, or laptops, Guangdong is a better fit. But for household plastic products, small home appliances, or automotive parts, Huangyan in Zhejiang is the place to go.
Huangyan is a mid-sized city that has 4,000+ mold suppliers. The mold industry here took off a few decades ago, back in the 70s–90s, starting with simple items like plastic bottles and caps. Fast-forward to today, Huangyan’s expertise covers almost every kind of household plastic product — chairs, lunch boxes, storage bins, PET bottles and caps — and extends to automotive tooling such as bumpers, grilles, headlights, and dashboards, many of which are exported to global OEMs.
One City, the Entire Mold Supply Chain
Whether you need a small workshop for a simple bottle-cap mold, a mid-sized factory for household goods tooling, or a massive industrial park for complex molds like bumpers or pallets, Huangyan has it all. On some streets, you may find a dozen suppliers, and most of them all specialize in household and packaging molds.
From reverse engineering and product design, to steel supply, CNC machining, polishing, texturing, and tryout, the supply chain here is incredibly dense and complete. On Alibaba, if you search for injection mold suppliers in categories like household goods, small appliances, and auto parts, Huangyan consistently shows up as one of the most concentrated clusters.
Many factories in Huangyan are adopting industrial robots for mold handling, tool changing, and material loading/unloading. This shift toward semi-unmanned production makes the process safer, faster, and more efficient.
Why Injection Molds So Expensive?
People often ask us why قالب الحقن is so expensive. To understand that, let’s first look at the different types of molds and when each type is typically used in the production cycle.
- Prototype molds (often aluminum): cheaper, but wear out quickly.
- Production molds (hardened steel): typically tens of thousands of dollars, lasting hundreds of thousands of cycles.
- Long-life molds (million-shot tools): even more expensive, built for endurance.
Steel molds can usually be repaired or modified for design changes, while aluminum molds — often used for prototypes or short runs under tens of thousands of pieces — wear out and cannot be reworked. Beyond these, the final price also depends on size, complexity, and precision: the larger and more complex, the higher the cost.
Found Molds at 1/4 Market Price
One of our clients wanted to start producing household plastics locally, but the cost of new molds was overwhelming. So today let’s explore some used mold options for him. Joe took us to this showroom. Every product on display, such as chairs, basins, and storage boxes, was made with their molds. For example, a plastic chair costs only about $4 in material, yet the mold for it is around $25,000.
The warehouse is stacked with used molds. The owner explained that many were still usable, with some able to run tens of thousands more shots. One example was a sports bottle mold priced at only a quarter of a new one.
This pallet mold was also available for immediate production.
But when a product goes out of style and the market no longer needs it, its molds often end up piled in a warehouse, sold off for just a few hundred dollars, treated like scrap metal.
If you looking to cut costs and save time on molds, second-hand molds are a smart option, especially for household plastic products. In manufacturing, most of the capital is usually tied up in equipment and inventory. That’s why many of our clients in Southeast Asia and Africa, who want to build their own factories, consider sourcing used molds from China. It’s not only because the price is far lower than new ones, and they don’t have to wait months for development. As long as a mold is in good condition and capable of sustained production, that’s enough for them. They can start manufacturing immediately.
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