IDC forecasts global spending on robotics and related services to grow at a CAGR of 17 percent in 2019. In terms of value, the spending will increase to $135.4 billion from $71 billion logged in 2015.
“Robotics is one of the core technologies that is enabling significant change in manufacturing through factory of the future initiatives. While traditionally used in the automotive industry, there is an increasing adoption of robotics in sectors like electronics, retail, healthcare, logistics, agriculture, services, education, and government,” said Jing Bing Zhang, Research Director, Robotics at IDC Manufacturing Insights.
“Such broad-based growth in robotic adoption is being driven by increasing labor costs, shortage of skilled labor, and an increasing emphasis on repeatable quality in conjunction with a reduction in prices of robotic systems and strategic national initiatives.”
The technology research agency noted that worldwide robotics spending would be dominated by the discrete and process manufacturing industries, which represented 33.2 percent and 30.2 percent of total spending in 2015, respectively.
Resource, healthcare, and the transportation industries are the next three largest commercial industries in terms of overall robotics spending.
Process manufacturing and healthcare are two of the fastest growing industries, with worldwide spending in each forecast to nearly double by 2019.
From a technology perspective, worldwide spending on robotics systems, which includes consumer, industrial, and service robots, is forecast to grow to nearly $32 billion in 2019.
At the same time, services-related spending, which encompasses applications management, education and training, hardware deployment, systems integration, and consulting, will grow to more than $32 billion in 2019.
Regionally, the Asia/Pacific region including Japan accounts for more than 65 percent of total robotics spending throughout the forecast.
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) is the second largest region with expenditures of $14.6 billion in 2015, followed by the Americas with 2015 spending totals of $9.7 billion.
Robotics spending will nearly double in Asia/Pacific over the 2015-2019 forecast period, making it the fastest growing region followed by the Americas.
Arya MM
editor@infotechlead.com
