We recently hosted a trip to Hannover Automation Fair meeting 15 publicly listed and private industry players as well as industry experts.

Bottom line: The demand environment remains healthy so far but awareness of looming headwinds is high; digitalisation and repatriation of manufacturing present clear market growth opportunities for Automation players but software-readiness is rapidly becoming a critical differentiating factor, especially for control-level market participants.

Decoupling of control software from hardware (“PLC virtualisation”) – taking place Evidence. We found clear evidence of this trend gathering pace across meetings with three corporates (two major listed, one private) launching offers that essentially separate PLC functionality from PLC hardware, highlight by one industry expert (“for machine tool builders, every customer conversation now is around software-based system”) and a dedicated private start-up players (Software Defined Automation – digital twins of PLCs permitting IT-like deployment of fleets of controllers);