Feature Drives & Controls
Steve Brambley, convener of GAMBICA’s variable speed drive (VSD) group, looks at the European market over the last five years and offers his predictions for the years to come
wiss bank Credit Suisse esti- mates that the global automation market is growing twice as fast as industrial production.
GAMBICA’s own research says much the same thing which states that the automation market here is growing while industrial production is not. Geography can make a big difference, especially if one compares Germany with the UK for example.
ple are much bigger and more difficult to stop with the onset of a recession. By the same token, it takes a while to get new projects started even during periods of economic recovery. The industrial automation market is faster reacting and is much more about products, so distributors can de-stock and end users can decide not to replace. Much of it is about investment in either new product lines or refurbishment of manufactur- ing equipment.
BRIC competition
The starting point also needs to be considered because the Credit Suisse analysis shows that the factory automation market has grown by an average of 7.6% per year since 2003 - or 2.1 times the rate for global indus- trial production.
Most of the trends that GAMBICA monitors are over a period of five years, so with a starting point of 2006/07 there were significant drops during the downturn of 2008/09, so they are only now back over the levels that they were at before. What this means overall is that since 2006, we have probably seen growth from zero to no more than ten percent. Had GAMBICA used 2009 as a star- ing point, this would have shown 30% growth. It is all about where you start and what you want to say. Similarly, 2006 to 2008 would have also shown a big boom.
The UK industrial automation sector went into the recession very quickly and has come out of it very quickly as well - compared to other sectors like process industries and instrumentation, where power station and chemical plant projects for exam-
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The question is whether the economic downturn has forced customers to look for cheaper imports from Brazil, Russia, India and China, or the so- called BRIC countries. The threat from BRIC imports into the European automation market is always there, but from the perspective of the GAMBICA membership, this is seen as part of the market rather than an actual present threat. The majority of the GAMBICA membership is not competing on cost - they tend to compete on product qual- ity, features, reliability, safety and added value support.
Despite popular belief, the UK is still a manufacturing nation, ranked ninth in the world in terms of manu- facturing output, and we still account for 2.3% of global manufacturing. That compares well with China, which is nearly 19% of global manu- facturing output. UK government trade missions have focussed on the BRIC high growth markets, and there is a key message for UK companies to develop export potential beyond the usual stagnant markets in the EU. These markets include the leading North American markets as well as BRIC countries. However, exporting is more difficult than selling into domestic markets, which itself is difficult enough in the current economic climate. This diffi- culty increases with greater geographic distance, different cultural expecta- tions, languages and laws.
Repair and refurbishment In another recent report, market ana- lyst Frost & Sullivan said that drives repairs are worth a third of new sales
APRIL 2013 Electrical Engineering
Where are we heading? S
Above: Steve Brambley, deputy director of GAMBICA and convener of the organisation’s VSD group
Left and below: examples of
applications where VSDs can play a key role
GAMBICA
www.gambica.org.uk T: 0207 642 8080
in Europe and the market was worth just under €600m in 2011, projected to exceed €940m by 2018. If it is a third of the size of new sales, then it is a quarter of the market.
This would seem to indicate that manufacturers are still keen to sweat their assets, something that was alluded to at The Energy Event in September 2012. However, there is a counteracting trend to asset sweat- ing and that is relocation to cheaper labour countries like Poland or China, in which case new equip- ment would almost invariably need to be procured.
Despite how significant the Frost & Sullivan report seems to say the repair market is worth, for the most part, the issue of drives repairs is not a barrier to growth. Only a small percentage of motors are equipped with a VSD yet at least half would save energy if con- trolled by one.
The moral of the story is that you should take any market research with a liberal pinch of salt. The base time- line from which the research data has been gathered can be chosen to prove boom or bust conditions.
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