“Forget textiles and all that, this is the future of China,” said Lin. “If you go and look back to Japan in the early 1970s it was a net importer of machinery as well, and within only three to four years it overtook the U.S. and became a net exporter.”

Shares in Zoomlion will double to HK$24 ($3.08) by July next year, according to Zhang Zharlen, an analyst with KGI Securities in Shanghai. Lin said she plans to buy shares of companies including Zoomlion once sentiment improves from the effect of government measures to cool the property market.

Sany’s Billionaires

Twenty-two years after starting as a welding factory, Sany Heavy has four billionaires on the board, more than 68,000 workers and sells products including concrete pumps and road rollers in 120 countries.

“For ages, people believed that Chinese can only make stuff like toys, clothes and hand torches -- all cheap and of bad quality,” Sany’s Senior Vice President Zhao Xiangzhang said in an interview in Changsha, the capital city of the southern Hunan province. “Our dream is to change this bad image.”

Sany opened an industrial park in June in Bedburg in Germany, home country of machinery makers Siemens AG and ThyssenKrupp AG. The company also supplied a pump that helped cool the crippled No. 4 reactor at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

‘Avoid Komatsu’

Chinese equipment manufacturers will be among the nation’s best performers over the next five years, according to Deutsche Bank. They have taken market share from competitors including South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. and Doosan Infracore Co., Japan’s Komatsu Ltd. and U.S.-based Caterpillar Inc., Pengana’s Lin said.

“We would avoid Komatsu because we think that Chinese companies will increase their competitiveness over the medium term,” Lin said. Komatsu is the world’s second-largest maker of construction and mining equipment, trailing Caterpillar.

Other potential “global losers” from Chinese competition include telecommunications companies Ericsson and Nokia Corp., industrial machinery maker Alstom SA and General Electric Co., Deutsche Bank said in a report last year.

The bank recommended buying Chinese equipment makers and avoiding “material- and labor-intensive companies” such as casual footwear maker Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Ltd. and VTech Holdings Ltd., a maker of cordless telephones and electronic learning products.