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

The Asia Pacific Process Automation Market is expected to witness a CAGR of 12.19% 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.
• Virtualization of automation control systems is observed as a key trend observed in the market, also known as the thin layer between the virtual machine and host server. The virtual machine contains the operating system and software. Different operating systems are operated on top of a primary operating system using virtual machines. Virtualization can be applied on layers in an industrial premise, such as server, storage, desktop, file, and network. It provides benefits, such as optimum resource utilization and operation, as well as power cost savings.
• The integration of different industrial automation systems, such as SCADA, PLCs, and MES, on a single physical server, which can be easily accessed at a different location on the plant floor using virtual machines, has been adopted to reduce the overall cost for server and increase the flexibility in adopting industrial automation systems and software in the process and discrete 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.

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.
• Developing countries like India have shifted their focus from import to home production further increasing the demand for the market.

Competitive Landscape

The Asia Pacific 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 - RoviSys announced its collaboration with VANTIQ a developer of next-generation applications to develop applications that can detect and contain COVID-19 in the food and beverage industry, apart from the critical life science sector.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support