November 24th, the Consumer Committee of China Association for Quality published its findings on the mean time between failures (short for MTBF) of excavators in 2012. The results show that the MTBF of small (smaller than 15 ton) and medium (larger than 15 ton and smaller than 25ton) tonnage excavators of Chinese brands approaches, even exceeds that of foreign brands. Among them, SANY surpasses foreign brands like Komatsu and Hitachi with MTBF of its excavators reaching 1048.35 hours.

MTBF refers to the average operation time between two neighboring breakdowns. It is an important indicator to describe the quality and reliability of products from the aspect of time dimension. The longer the time is, the lower the frequency of failures is during the life cycle of a product.

In this investigation, SANY tops the list of the six brands surveyed with its MTBF reaching 1048.35 hours, surpasses Komatsu's 1009.2 hours and Kobelco's 999.86 hours. Besides, two other Chinese brands, Liugong and Yuchai rank fifth and sixth respectively with 881.44 and 748.09 hours.

The results also show that the hydraulic system is the one that with a higher failure rate for both Chinese and foreign brands. As for electric system, the failure rate of Chinese brands is higher than that of foreign brands. While as for bodywork and structural system, the failure rate of Chinese brands is lower than that of foreign brands.