CNC Market Has Bright Spots that Smooth
Machine Tool Market “Roller Coaster” Dips
Dedham, Massachusetts; November 3, 2003: The worldwide CNC market followed the sharp downturn in the machine tool market with a bruising nine percent fall over the past two years. The drop in machinery purchases was a somewhat self-inflicted result of developing all-in-one machines that do everything well at high speed. Declining demand for machinery is expected to continue with the trend to outsource manufacturing overseas. One savior has been strong growth for CNCs in Japan. The worldwide CNC market is expected to grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 3 percent over the next five years. The market was $3.3 billion in 2002 and is forecasted to be $3.9 billion in 2007, according to the new ARC Advisory Group study “CNC Worldwide Outlook”.
Cycle Proofing the Industry Is the #1 Priority
“Suppliers of CNC systems who leverage the right strategies can grow despite the slowdown in the machine tool market,” according to Sal Spada, ARC Research Director. Fears of obsolescence and technological change are driving market growth. End users are focusing on retrofits and upgrades of existing machines to avoid obsolescence. For example, the merging of CNCs with robotics to create manufacturing cells is used to compete with the low-wage outsourcing trend. The machine tool business and their use of CNCs declined in 2002. However, refurbishments provided a boost and growth in the total CNC market. Overall, the forecast is promising as the demand for CNC retrofits and upgrades will grow as the population of installed machines increases.
The five year worldwide outlook for the CNC market continues to sustain its relatively low single digit growth rate during this period. The expectation is that the market has put the downward cycle behind it and will continue to face a sustainable demand in CNC based machine tools from both the industrialized and under developed regions of the world. More specifically, Japan and Asia are expected to experience above average growth in their regions. Japan in particular, with its strong infrastructure of machine tool manufacturers, is in a desirable position to satisfy the demand coming from the manufacturing buildup in China and South East Asia.
The Markets Are Changing
Overall, the growth in the Asian market which is expected to be over 8 percent annually during the forecast period is primarily derived from three specific countries: China, Korea, and Taiwan. Most importantly, the Taiwanese and Korean machine builders should not be ignored as this is an industry that mirrors Japan's market entry strategy over 20 years ago, with the exception that the Asians are highly dependent upon the Japanese CNC providers ― Fanuc and Mitsubishi ― to instrument their machines. While the Koreans have strengthened their automotive production capacity, they have also strengthened the machine tool infrastructure to support this industry.
The story in China is quite different as many of foreign machine tool builders are establishing subsidiaries in this region. These subsidiaries are not just distribution centers, but full fledged assembly and manufacturing operations capable of producing machine tools for the local Chinese market. This is one of the factors shifting the point of sale for many of the CNC systems in the near term. In effect, CNC sales that would have originated in regions such as North America, Japan, or Europe are now being sold directly in China.
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