Bochum, September 13th, 2010. The Quest Trend Magazine has recently published the second part of the three-part series of articles with the headline „Automation trends, market structure, economic crisis“. This serial investigates the connection between the trends in the automation technology, the market structure of their suppliers and the economic crisis.
The first article with the headline „The trends in the automation technology“ identified the two main trends in automation. The first main trend marked the substitution of the electromechanics by microelectronics in the 1980 and 1990 years. Around the year 2000 an ever higher degree of integration of microelectronics resp. automation came to the fore as new main trend. This trend is also determining these days but differentiating.
The second article of this serial consists of two sections according to the two main trends in automation.
The first section states that the substitution of the electromechanics by microelectronics favoured the formation of numerous new and medium-sized suppliers. The article calls four reasons for this development i.e. the know-how about microelectronics and its concentration on new products, fast and user-friendly enhancement of the products, relatively low capital requirement and growing sales markets.
The substitution of electromechanics by microelectronics provided both benefits and disadvantages for the large market leading suppliers. The benefits consisted in offering electromechanics and microelectronics at the same time making the transition process in the machinery industry and its customers easier. In addition the large suppliers could easier fulfill the need for standardisation of the microelectronics. On the other hand the disadvantages became apparent in speed losses related to the dynamic development of the microelectronics. At this point the medium-sized suppliers operated much faster.
The second main trend, starting from the year 2000, consists in an ever higher degree of integration of the automation. This again changed the market structure of the suppliers. The article calls six reasons for these changes, e.g. the wave of foundation of new suppliers was exhausted because capital requirement and know-how for integrated solutions had risen; the sales markets for integrated solutions differentiated into markets for integrated partial and total solutions being smaller in each case than the former markets determined by substitution. Accordingly the medium-sized suppliers differentiated into three groups: the first group was focused on integrated part solutions, the second one grew into integrated total solutions and the suppliers of the third group were bought up by large companies. During this period of differentiating markets large suppliers were losing market shares to the group of medium-sized suppliers being able to process differentiated markets in a better differentiated manner.
The proceeding internationalisation of the production favours in turn the large, worldwide active suppliers that can offer integrated total solutions in particular for the production sites of the other worldwide active companies.
The article closes with referring to the perspectives of the medium-sized suppliers of the automation technology.
This series of articles addresses the connections between automation, market structure and economic crisis. Particularly in times of rapid, partly erratic changes the Quest Trend Magazine tries for facilitating the orientation and decisions both of the machine-builders and the suppliers of automation technology with this series of articles.
Quest TechnoMarketing, Bochum, London, is the publisher of the Quest Trend Magazine. Quest TechnoMarketing www.qtm.de/e analyses the automation market for more than 20 years.
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