How much does an aluminium extrusion line cost? A full price breakdown

Almost nobody in this industry publishes prices. Western press makers quote after a site visit, Chinese factories hide behind "get the latest price" forms, and marketplaces list machines with no context. If you are planning to produce aluminium profiles yourself — instead of buying them from an extruder — that makes budgeting nearly impossible.

So here are the numbers. They are indicative ranges based on our market research and factory quotations, not a binding price list, but they are realistic enough to build an investment case on. All prices are EXW China unless stated otherwise; we use "aluminium" throughout, and everything applies equally if you search for it as an aluminum extrusion plant.

The short answer

A complete aluminium extrusion line from a vetted Chinese factory — press, billet heating furnace, handling and cooling tables, stretcher, saw, aging oven — typically lands between €250,000 and €700,000 of equipment cost for the common tonnage range (1000–1800 t). Add surface finishing (powder coating or anodising) and you move towards €0.7–1.8 million. Full turnkey plants with melting, casting and finishing run to roughly 0.5–2 million USD — which is 30–70% below what the same capacity costs from Western European or Japanese builders.

On top of the equipment you should budget for freight, EU import duty (typically 0–4.5% on machinery — not the 22–32% figure you may have seen, more on that below), VAT (deductible for businesses), EU conformity work on safety systems, foundations and commissioning. As a rule of thumb, a realistic "ready to produce" budget is the EXW equipment price plus 15–30%.

Now the breakdown.

Extrusion press prices by tonnage

The press is the single largest machine and the anchor of the whole budget. Chinese presses in this class come with the component mix that matters: Rexroth hydraulics, Siemens PLCs, H13 tool-steel containers and stems, forged main cylinders. Prices below are indicative EXW ranges; output figures assume two-shift operation and depend heavily on the die mix.

Press force	Billet	Typical output (2 shifts)	Indicative price, EXW China
600 t	4″	150–250 t/month	€40–65k
1000 t	5″	250–350 t/month	€55–85k
1400–1600 t	6″	350–500 t/month	€75–130k
1800 t	7″	450–650 t/month	€95–160k
2500 t	8–9″	600–900 t/month	€160–280k
3600 t and up	10–12″	project-specific	€300k+

The two bolded rows are where most first and second presses land. A 1000-tonne press for 5-inch billet covers the vast majority of architectural profiles — window frames, insect screens, furniture, light PV frames. An 1800-tonne press for 7-inch billet is the workhorse of mid-size plants: window and facade systems plus mid-section industrial profiles. The full tonnage range, from 530 to above 5000 tonnes, is covered on our extrusion presses category page.

Within each row, the spread comes from configuration: conventional versus VFD drive (roughly 15% energy saving) versus servo, short or long stroke, front or rear billet loading, and the level of instrumentation. The upper end of each range is usually a servo version with extended equipment.

For comparison: a new Western European press of equivalent tonnage typically costs several times these figures. That is not a rounding difference — it changes whether the project is financeable at all for a mid-size company.

What the rest of the line costs

A press alone does not make profiles. Around it you need heat, handling and hardening. For a 1000 t line, indicative EXW budgets look like this:

Line component	What it does	Indicative price, EXW
Multi-log billet heating furnace with hot shear	heats 3–8 m logs, shears billets to length	€45–95k
Die oven	preheats dies before pressing	€8–20k
Handling system: run-out and cooling tables, puller, stretcher, automatic saw	receives, cools, straightens and cuts profiles	€60–120k
Aging oven, 4–18 baskets	T5/T6 hardening, 3–20 t per load	€40–85k
Packing: film taping, wrapping or bagging + heat shrink	protects profiles for transport	€10–40k

Put together with the press, a sensible starter line around 1000 t comes to roughly €250–450k of equipment; the 1800 t equivalent runs roughly €350–650k. Ordering the whole line from one manufacturer is worth real money here: one FAT test, one shipping operation, and machines actually sized to each other — a billet furnace that matches the press cycle, an aging oven that matches press output.

Two items people forget in the first budget:

• Dies. Every profile needs its own die. Chinese dies cost a fraction of European ones, but a starting die library of 20–50 profiles is still a five-figure position, and dies wear out — this is a recurring cost, not capex.
• Spare parts and consumables. A container of wear parts (dummy blocks, shear blades, seals, felt for the handling tables) ordered with the line is far cheaper than air-freighting them one by one later.

Adding surface finishing

Mill-finish profiles are only half a business in most markets. Finishing is where budgets grow:

• A horizontal powder coating line starts at a few hundred thousand euro depending on capacity and automation.
• A vertical powder coating line — 800–1200 t/month, 2–3 operators, ≥98% powder recovery — runs indicatively €350–700k EXW and needs an 8.5–9 m tall building.
• Anodising plants are engineered projects, not products: compact 60 t/month starter lines sit at the low end, fully automatic 300 t/month plants at several times that. Tank materials, rectifier count and automation level drive the price.

This is why "extrusion plant cost" answers range from half a million to two million dollars: the extrusion line itself is the smaller part of a fully integrated plant.

Why Chinese lines cost 30–70% less — the honest version

The gap is real, and it is not primarily a quality story. Three factors explain most of it:

1. Labour. A press is thousands of hours of fabrication, machining and assembly. Chinese shop-floor labour costs a fraction of German or Italian rates, and machine building is labour-intensive.
2. Scale and supply chain. The Foshan–Guangdong region builds more extrusion machinery than the rest of the world combined. Frames, cylinders, castings and heat treatment are all available locally at volume prices.
3. Component mix. Critical components — hydraulic pumps and valves, PLCs — are often the same German and Japanese brands you would get in a Western press. The savings sit in the fabricated steel, the auxiliary systems and the engineering hours, not usually in the parts that fail expensively.

And the honest caveats, because the gap is not free money:

• Safety systems are built to a different baseline. A factory-standard Chinese press requires EU conformity work — guarding, safety circuits, documentation — before it can legally run in Europe. That is a real project with a real cost, and it belongs in your budget from day one.
• Engineering support is thinner. Western builders sell process know-how with the machine. From a Chinese factory you get a machine that works; process optimisation is more on you (or on a partner who fills that gap).
• Distance is a cost. A technician from Guangdong is not on your site tomorrow. Mitigate it with a proper FAT before shipment, a spare-parts package, and remote-diagnostics-ready controls.

We built our whole model around closing exactly these gaps — factory audit, component verification, FAT attendance, honest CE status on every machine page — so the 30–70% stays a saving instead of becoming a lesson.

Landed cost for EU buyers: freight, duty, VAT

Here is the part where most myths live.

Freight. A complete line ships as a mix of standard containers and flat racks or breakbulk for the press sections. As a planning figure, budget 3–6% of the equipment value for sea freight and insurance from a South China port to a North European port in a normal freight market. Add inland transport and crane work at your end.

Import duty. EU duty on this class of machinery is low: depending on the exact HS code, typically 0–4.5%, with many machinery positions around 1.7–2.7%. Have your customs broker confirm the classification per machine before ordering — the furnaces, press and handling equipment may classify differently.

The anti-dumping myth. You may have read that the EU applies 22–32% anti-dumping duties "on Chinese aluminium extrusions". True — but those duties apply to imported aluminium profiles, not to the machinery that makes them. There is no anti-dumping duty on extrusion presses or furnaces. In fact, those profile duties are precisely why producing profiles inside the EU has become more attractive, and why demand for extrusion machinery in Europe is growing. The regulation that scares people away from this investment is actually the argument for it.

VAT. Import VAT (23% in Poland; your national rate elsewhere) is charged on the customs value plus duty. For a VAT-registered business it is deductible — a cash-flow item, not a cost. Several EU countries, Poland included, offer postponed accounting mechanisms so the VAT never leaves your account at all. Confirm the mechanics with your accountant.

Worked example, indicative: a €300k EXW line → ~€315k CIF with freight and insurance → ~€320–329k after duty at 0–4.5% → import VAT charged but recovered → effective landed cost roughly €320–330k, before installation and conformity work.

Gulf buyers: the GCC common external tariff on machinery is typically 5%, with VAT at 5% (UAE) to 15% (Saudi Arabia) — and no anti-dumping issue either. Shorter sea routes from China also cut freight time by several weeks.

CE: what to demand, not what to hope for

Chinese extrusion presses and furnaces do not normally arrive CE-compliant, whatever the sticker says. Our position, machine by machine, uses three honest statuses: genuinely CE-certified (rare, mostly auxiliary machines — and even then we verify the certificate's scope and issuing body), conformity retrofit possible (typical for presses and furnaces — a priced project, not a promise), or buyer acts as importer and carries the conformity obligations.

Whatever you buy, demand in writing: an EC Declaration of Conformity for the specific machine and serial number, the name of the issuing or assessing body, and the technical documentation behind it. A CE logo on a nameplate with no traceable paperwork is decoration. Note also that from 20 January 2027 the new Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 replaces the Machinery Directive and puts explicit verification and documentation duties on the importer — if that importer is you, price that responsibility in.

Timeline: order to first profile

Nobody sells a serious extrusion press "off the shelf". Realistic expectations:

• Press production: 18–28 weeks depending on tonnage and configuration
• Auxiliary machines: 3–14 weeks (furnaces and packing machines are much faster than presses)
• FAT and shipment preparation: 1–2 weeks
• Sea freight to Europe: 6–8 weeks
• Installation and commissioning: 4–8 weeks, including foundations done in parallel during production

End to end, plan 9–12 months from signed contract to first saleable profile for a complete line. Use the production months well: building permits, gas and power connections, foundations, die orders, billet supply contracts and operator hiring all fit inside that window if you start them at contract signature, not at delivery.

What moves the price up or down

• Tonnage — the dominant factor; force roughly tracks price
• Drive type — conventional < VFD < servo; VFD saves ~15% energy and usually pays back fast at two-shift operation
• Automation level — manual stacking versus automatic handling can swing the line price by tens of thousands of euro
• Scope — a bare press is cheap; a line that runs with a small crew is not
• Conformity work — guarding, safety circuits and documentation for the EU
• Site works — foundations, utilities, crane capacity; typically 8–15% of equipment value

Get a real number for your project

Ranges are for planning; your quotation should be for your profile drawings, your building and your target output. Send us a profile cross-section (or just the tonnage and monthly volume you have in mind) and we will come back with a configured line, indicative pricing on the same open basis as the ranges above, and a delivery schedule — including the honest cost items other sellers leave out of the first offer. Use the inquiry form or write to us directly; a first budget answer normally takes a few working days, not weeks.