March 17, 2009 - Low Power AC Drives, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), General Motion Controls (GMC), Computer Numerical Controls (CNC), and Machine Safeguarding represent the core automation for production machinery. The shipments of automation components to the OEM machine builder and system integrator market rely upon increasingly more advanced automation to remain competitive. The worldwide market for Production Machinery Automation is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.4% over the next five years. The market was $18.0 billion in 2008 and is forecasted to be over $21.2 billion in 2013, according to a new ARC Advisory Group study.
“Increasingly more machinery applications are moving to much higher speeds of operation as well as providing more capability to reduce changeover time. Production raw materials are becoming less consistent as recycled materials enter the market. The result is that machine builders need to consider a wider range of operation in the original design to accommodate changes,” according to Research Director Sal Spada, the principal author of ARC’s “Production Machinery Automation Worldwide Outlook”.
Machine Builders in Emerging Markets Leverage Proximity to Customers
Developing economies all over the world are increasing the demand for industrial production machinery at high rates. Feeding this demand has been a surge of regional machine builders in emerging markets. Domestic machine builders with a vertical specialization have an advantage that goes beyond machine performance issues. It is the greater understanding of the technical and cultural needs of the end user customer that are now emerging as competitive advantages to machine builders in these markets. Regional OEMs, including both domestic and foreign transplants, have leveraged their close proximity to the customer to create an understanding of the particular niche their customers operate in and are able to build machines which are more suitable for regional issues. The growth of OEMs in emerging markets has enabled manufacturers who once relied on a comparative labor advantage to produce low valued products to become confident with employing machinery in their facilities that will enable production of higher valued finished goods. Because of this, industrial automation suppliers are also experiencing a tremendous growth in these emerging markets in both unit volume and unit value.
China and India Offer the Next Opportunity
In many developing regions, such as China and India, the final goods exports are beginning to appear far more high-tech than the economics of comparative advantage would predict. Developing regions have realized that they can greatly improve vertical specialization by employing machinery with greater intelligence even if it means that some of their workers may lose their jobs initially.
