Global OEM growth drives machine business

ARC report sees international expansion boosting production machinery automation market

By Plant Engineering Staff March 13, 2009

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 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 ”.

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.automation suppliers are also experiencing a tremendous growth in these emerging markets in both unit volume and unit value.

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.