New Chinese extrusion press or used European? An honest TCO comparison

Every investor budgeting an extrusion plant eventually types the same phrase into a search engine: used aluminium extrusion press for sale. The logic feels unbeatable — a second-hand press from Germany or Italy costs a fraction of a new machine, it has already proven it can run, and European engineering has a reputation that fifty years of marketing have paid for.

Full disclosure before a single number: we sell new machines from China, so we have a commercial interest in this comparison. That is exactly why you will get figures instead of adjectives — and, at the end, an honest list of situations where the used press genuinely is the better decision. There are fewer of them than used-machinery dealers suggest, but more than zero.

What the second-hand market actually offers

Start with the fact that every theoretical "new vs used" comparison skips: a functioning market for second hand extrusion presses barely exists in Europe. What exists is a lottery of individual survivors.

Go looking today and here is what you find. Industrial marketplaces such as Exapro or Machineseeker list, at any given moment, perhaps a dozen extrusion presses across the whole continent. Typical vintages run from the 1970s to the 1990s — a UBE 800-tonne press built in 1979 is a representative specimen, not an unlucky example. Tonnages are whatever happens to be for sale, locations range from Spain to Turkey, and the standard sale condition is "as is, where is": you buy the machine standing cold in a hall, at your risk, with dismantling on your account.

This is not a market failure — it is the logic of the product. A good extrusion press works for 40–50 years, and nobody sells one while it is earning money. What reaches the second-hand market comes from plant liquidations and replacement projects: by definition, the machines their previous owners decided to part with. The practical consequence for an investor is brutal: you do not choose tonnage, billet diameter and stroke to match your order book — you take what is listed this quarter. If your profile portfolio calls for a 1000-tonne press with 5-inch billet and the marketplace has an 800-tonne machine with a 6-inch container, no discount makes it the right press.

Compare that with specifying a new machine: tonnage, billet diameter, stroke length, loading side and drive type are all chosen around your profile drawings, from the full range of extrusion presses between 530 and 5,400 tonnes.

Sticker prices: used European vs new Chinese

Indicative ranges for the press alone (no line equipment), based on marketplace listings and our published catalogue ranges:

Machine class	Used, Europe (1970s–90s build)	New from China (EXW)
approx. 800–1000 t	approx. €25–80k, ex seller's hall	€55–85k
approx. 1600–1800 t	approx. €50–130k, ex seller's hall	€95–160k

The used ranges are wide because the market is: the same class of machine trades at €30k or €100k depending on year, condition and how urgently the seller needs the hall empty.

Two things jump out of this table if you read it honestly. First, the purchase-price gap between a second-hand European press and a new Chinese one is typically 30–60% — not the "five times cheaper" that used-machinery folklore promises. Five times cheaper is the comparison against a new Western European press, which is a different discussion entirely (and the reason the Chinese route exists — a new Western press of the same tonnage costs several times the Chinese figure).

Second, the Chinese price is EXW, so you add sea freight and import duty. Which is where the most persistent myth in this industry lives: the EU's 22–32% anti-dumping duties apply to Chinese aluminium profiles, not to the machinery that produces them. Duty on this class of machinery is typically 0–4.5% depending on the CN code, and import VAT is deductible for a VAT-registered business — a cash-flow item, not a cost. The profile duties actually work in a machinery investor's favour: they are precisely why extruding profiles inside Europe pays better than importing them. The full landed-cost arithmetic is in our extrusion line cost guide.

What the used price tag hides

"Ex seller's hall" is where the used-press bill starts, not where it ends. These are the positions that most often surprise investors in our conversations:

Dismantling, transport, foundations. A 1000-tonne press is tens of tonnes of steel split into major assemblies. Dismantling at the seller's site (frequently under a deadline to vacate the building), oversize road transport across half of Europe, new foundations and reassembly realistically cost €25–60k — sometimes more than the machine itself. A new press needs foundations and installation too, but it arrives in containers, with foundation drawings and a commissioning crew priced into the contract before you sign.

The overhaul you will do whether you planned it or not. A press with 30–45 years of service has a worn container, tired guideways, hydraulics built on pumps nobody manufactures any more, and relay controls or a 1990s PLC. An honest recommissioning overhaul — seals, piping, main-cylinder inspection, a modern control system — runs €30–80k. That assumes the frame inspection finds no cracks.

Spare parts. Most press builders from the 1970s–80s no longer exist or abandoned those series decades ago. A damaged side cylinder or a non-standard valve is not a catalogue order; it is a reverse-engineering job with lead time measured in weeks — and every week of waiting is a week your whole plant stands still. New machines in our range run Rexroth hydraulics and Siemens controls: components serviceable across Europe with normal availability.

Documentation and conformity. A 1979 press never carried CE marking, because CE did not exist. If the machine has been in legal use inside the EU, it can generally continue operating under the minimum work-equipment requirements (Directive 2009/104/EC) — but mind the trap: a deep modernisation (new controls, changes to safety systems) can be judged a substantial modification, after which the press is treated as a new machine and needs full conformity assessment. And if you import a used press from outside the EU — Turkey being the common case — you carry exactly the same obligations as for a new machine. Add to this the routine reality of missing manuals, hydraulic schematics on 40-year-old blueprint paper, and an electrical cabinet carrying four decades of undocumented "improvements". Our CE guide for Chinese machinery explains what proper conformity paperwork looks like — the same standards of evidence apply to a used machine's file.

Energy. An old press with fixed-displacement pumps has never heard of a variable-frequency drive. A modern VFD drive saves roughly 15% of energy; on a 1000-tonne press running two shifts, that difference is indicatively €10–20k per year on the electricity bill. Over ten years, that single line item can exceed what you paid for the used machine.

The new Chinese press: risks without the gloss

Symmetry demands the other side of the ledger, and we will not sugar-coat it — these are the risks we built our whole process around:

• Lead time. A press is 18–28 weeks of production plus 6–8 weeks of sea freight: realistically 7–9 months from order to commissioning. Anyone promising faster is selling a stock configuration or bluffing. This belongs in your investment schedule from day one.
• Supplier verification. Trading offices posing as factories are standard practice in Chinese machinery export. Before any first transaction we demand the business licence, audit the physical plant, and verify that the declared Rexroth pumps and Siemens PLCs are genuine rather than "genuine in the brochure".
• Acceptance before shipment. A FAT test with actual extrusion on a die for your profile, with a measurement protocol — before the machine enters the container, not after it lands in your hall. This is a standard clause in every transaction we broker.
• CE. A factory-standard Chinese press requires EU conformity work: guarding, safety circuits, documentation and manuals in your language. We do not promise "CE included" — we price the conformity project and state plainly who formally carries responsibility in your purchase structure. From 20 January 2027 the Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 puts explicit, hard obligations on the importer — wherever you buy, demand an EC Declaration of Conformity with a traceable issuing body, not a sticker.
• Service at 8,000 km. The factory is not around the corner — which is why European-serviceable components, a wear-parts package shipped with the machine, and commissioning and warranty terms written into the contract matter so much.

The real difference between the two options is not that one carries risk and the other does not. It is that the risks of a new machine can be neutralised by procedure before you pay — audit, FAT, contract terms — while the risks of a 45-year-old machine are discovered after purchase, with a screwdriver.

The 10-year TCO table

The comparison that matters is total cost of ownership, not the invoice. Assumptions: 1000-tonne class press, two-shift operation, all figures indicative ranges in thousand EUR. Energy is shown as the excess against a new VFD-driven press (baseline = 0).

Cost position (10 years)	Used European, 1970s–90s	New from China
Machine purchase	25–80	55–85 (EXW)
Transport + duty	15–40 (dismantling + EU road transport)	10–18 (sea freight, duty 0–4.5%)
Foundations, installation, commissioning	15–35 (no manufacturer support)	15–30 (with manufacturer's crew)
Overhaul / initial conformity work	30–80 (recommissioning overhaul)	10–25 (EU safety conformity project)
Documentation and conformity assessment	10–30 (rebuilding files, "substantial modification" risk)	included in the line above
Energy — excess vs VFD drive	+100–200 (approx. 10–20/year)	0 (baseline)
Parts and service over 10 years	80–150 (custom-made parts, longer downtime)	40–80 (catalogue components)
Indicative total	275–615	130–238

One position honestly refuses to fit in a table: the cost of unplanned downtime. When the press stops, the entire plant stops with it — billet furnace, aging oven, packing — while customer deadlines keep running. On a machine with no manufacturer behind it and no parts on the shelf, a serious failure costs weeks, not days.

The conclusion is uncomfortable for intuition: the used press wins exactly one row — "purchase". Over a 10-year horizon the new Chinese press comes out cheaper in almost every realistic scenario, and the advantage is built mainly by energy and service: costs you pay monthly, which is precisely why they are so easy to ignore on the day you buy.

When a second-hand press genuinely makes sense

We promised honesty, so here are the cases where we would advise the used machine ourselves:

• You are buying first-hand from an operating plant near you. The press is running, you can watch it extrude, you get the service history and often the people who know it. That is a fundamentally different transaction from a marketplace "as is, where is".
• You found a recently retrofitted machine — new hydraulics, new controls, current documentation. Rare, but it happens, and when it does, our table's numbers no longer apply.
• Your budget is hard-capped below roughly €50k and you consciously accept downtime risk. A running used press beats a new one you cannot afford to equip with a line.
• You need capacity in 2–3 months, not in three quarters. No procedure shortens a new machine's lead time. If a contract is waiting, second-hand is sometimes the only answer.
• You have a strong in-house maintenance team, ideally with people who know old hydraulics from experience. Then part of the service column in our table becomes labour you already pay for.

If, on the other hand, the press is meant to be the heart of a 10–15-year business plan — producing repeatably and growing with your order book — the TCO arithmetic points to a new machine, and the Chinese route is what closes the price gap against Western Europe, provided the supplier is verified.

Run both scenarios on your own numbers

Every range in this article is indicative — your result depends on the profiles you want to extrude, your energy tariff and what happens to be listed second-hand this month. Send us a profile cross-section and your target monthly output, and we will prepare a concrete comparison: a press sized to your profiles with our openly published price ranges, delivery and EU conformity costs, and a schedule from order to first profile. If the numbers show that in your situation the used machine wins — we will tell you that too. Contact us through the inquiry form, or attach your profile drawings straight away.