Europe Process Automation Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2021 - 2026)

The Europe process automation market is expected to witness a CAGR of 5.08% over the forecast period 2021 - 2026. The COVID-19 pandemic created an economic turmoil for small, medium, and large-scale industries across the world. Adding to the woes, country-wise lockdown inflicted by the governments around the world, to minimize the spread of the virus, impacted the growth of industries.

Key Highlights

• The automation industry has been revolutionized by the combination of the digital and physical aspects of manufacturing, aimed at delivering optimum performance. Further, the focus on achieving zero waste production and shorter time to market has augmented the growth of the market.
• Automation of manufacturing processes has offered various benefits, such as effortless monitoring, reduction of waste, and speed of production. This technology offers customers an improved quality with standardization and dependable products within time, and at a much lower cost.
• Connecting the industrial machinery and equipment and obtaining real-time data have played a key role in the adoption of SCADA, HMI, PLC systems, and software that offer visualization; thus enables reducing the faults in the product, reducing downtime, scheduling maintenance, and switching from being in the reactive state to predictive and prescriptive stages for decision-making.
• The Germany’s Industry 4.0 initiative therefore has ignited worldwide cooperative efforts in multiple countries such as China, Japan and India. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the Industrial 4.0 are at the centre of new technological approaches for development, production, and management of the entire logistics chain, otherwise known as smart factory automation and are dominating trends in the industrial sector, with machinery and devices being connected via the internet.
• European nations have been in the forefront for the adoption of industrial automation solutions and has been under the constant support of government. For instance, the Industrial Strategy, revealed by the UK government primarily outlined a plan to invest GBP 2 billion per year by 2020 for new research and development in the technology sector. The smart manufacturing and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIot) will be built upon the work that automation has already forged over these years. By focusing on the possibilities that the automation solutions will enable, it will present the opportunity for multiple industries to push the boundaries of technological innovation which is very crucial for the UK economy in a post-Brexit phase. The automation solutions are expected to revolutionize the process industries.

Key Market Trends

Industry 4.0 and IoT Developments to Drive the Market

• Major technological innovations, such as AI, high-tech sensors, cloud computing, and Big Data analytics, are expected to significantly alter the landscape of the new industrial era, also known as Industry 4.0. In this reality, automation system types, such as PLCs, are expected to play a significant role as the main control, input center, and HMI for human workers.
• The IoT demand trend is expected to shift toward industrial space from consumer demand over the near future, primarily driven by various Industry 4.0 applications. Furthermore, process industries, such as chemical and petrochemical, paper and pulp, water and wastewater treatment, energy and utilities, oil and gas, pharmaceutical, food and beverages, are expected to fuel the market’s growth. Similar trends were observed in the European market as well.
• To operate the increasing number of connected devices and machine-to-machine connection in the manufacturing industry, the need for control and supervision is expected to become more prominent; this can be attributed to the increase of network connected and controlled devices and systems.
• With the high rate of adoption of connected devices and sensors and the enabling of M2M communication, there has been a surge in the data points that are generated in the manufacturing industry. According to Zebra’s latest Manufacturing Vision Study, smart asset tracking solutions based on IoT and RFID are expected to overtake traditional, spreadsheet-based methods by 2022. A study by Industrial IoT (IIoT) company. Microsoft Corporation. found that 85% of companies have at least one IIoT use case project. This number may increase, as 94% of respondents said they would implement IIoT strategies by 2021.
• Vendors in the European market are keeping up with these trends. For instance, in May 2020, Andritz Automation, Austria based automation vendor has won an award for its pilot project that involves training an AI controller to run an industrial plant. The company claims that the application is first of its kind in reinforcement learning, mainly to control continuous industrial processes.

Pharmaceutical Industry to Drive the Market

• The global IoT demand trend is expected to shift toward industrial space from consumer demand over the coming years, with sheer volumes demand driven by various Industry 4.0 applications. A significant share of the demand is expected to drive by process industries, such as pharmaceutical,
• There is an increase in the importance of providing precision to measure the quantity of medicine consumped which has increased the demand for measuring equipments for the same.
• Increase in need for process automation solutions to various processes such as manufacturing, testing, drug development, packaging and distribution are among the factors that are likely to propel the growth in the pharmaceutical industry in process automation and instrumentation market.
• Additionaly, increased number of pharmaceutical companies for process automation solutions have entered the market due to complex manufacturing processes such as milling, granulation, coating, and tablet pressing.

Competitive Landscape

The European Process Automation Market is moderately fragmented with few new entrants and few dominant players in the market. The companies keep on innovating and entering into strategic partnerships in order to retain their market share.

• May 2020 - OleumTech, a provider of wireless industrial automation and IoT solutions, announced the launch of new smart pressure transmitters (HGPT Smart Gauge Pressure Transmitters). These transmitters are an addition to its fast-growing H Series line of hardwired process instrumentation and claimed to deliver remarkable performance, accuracy, and reliability that is ideal for process industries, such as petrochemical, chemical, power, upstream oil and gas, and wastewater.

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