Forecasting a 10 per cent fall in machine vision sector sales across Europe this year, VDMA Machine Vision - one of the industry’s largest member organisations - is suggesting a deteriorating outlook, with no expected growth for 2025.
Warning of the market downturn across the short-term, Chairman of VDMA Machine Vision, Mark Williamson suggested a struggling manufacturing sector was to blame: “The manufacturing industry is the most important customer for the European machine vision industry, with a market share of 71 percent for systems and 62 percent for components, said Williamson.
Germany is Europe’s largest economy, and third globally behind the US and China, so with German orders slumping year-on-year by 4.3 percent in July and recently dropping 3.4 percent again in August, the outlook is bleak. “The Germany economy will stagnate at best in the second half of the year,” said Commerzbank’s Senior Economist, Ralph Solveen. “A revival is not expected until next year, and even this is likely to be very modest.”
Struggles brief for machine vision
The struggles in Germany’s industrial markets are “having a dampening effect on demand for machine vision products in the short term,” said Williamson. But “in the medium to long-term, the industry’s success story will continue, as machine vision remains a key automation technology, he added.
Automation trending
A trend for automation is holding up the longer term machine vision market, and stretches across both manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors. In fact, VDMA Machine Vision suggests that demand for machine vision systems outside of manufacturing rose by 5 percent, to a market share of 29 percent in 2023 - continuing the ongoing rise of machine vision technologies in new areas. The biggest and most important of them being intelligent traffic systems (revenue share of 61 percent), logistics and postal sorting (20 percent) and mechanical equipment (7 percent). Meanwhile, the demand for machine vision components outside of manufacturing sectors accounts for a total of 38 percent of sales.
Major use cases for machine vision systems
Of the number of machine vision systems sales, VDMA Machine Vision reports that up to 34 percent of them are used as inspection applications including quality control, printing and surface inspection. Applications for robotics and automated assembly are the manufacturing sector’s second most popular for machine vision, with a 23 percent share, while object recognition claims 16 percent.
Looking ahead with hope for the future
The emergence of artificial intelligence as a key component in machine vision application systems has become a major sales driver for companies looking to invest in machine vision. Sales of products that use AI as a solution enabling technology rose to 19 percent in 2023, for example, according to a VDMA survey. To which over two thirds of respondents also stated that AI is a driving force for the current and future machine vision business.
Meanwhile with almost 500 exhibitors honing in on Stuttgart for VISION 2024 this week to showcase their latest innovative developments and intriguing case studies, and trending topics such as artificial intelligence, hyperspectral and multispectral imaging and the lighting side of machine vision all key discussion topics, there’s plenty to get excited about.
