The European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) has published its 2016 Market Report “Machine Vision in the UK and Ireland”. The report for the first time maps the machine vision markets in the UK and Ireland. It covers the vision industry, their customers and the main applications as well as technical and commercial trends. In addition, the “eco system” for machine vision is described, including clusters, research centers and associations, trade shows and special magazines. This is being supplemented by market and growth drivers and an estimate of the market volume.

“Machine vision has a long tradition in the UK from the very beginning of the industry. Today, only a few component manufacturers are located in the country and the market is mainly supplied by vision technology through distributors”, says Andreas Breyer, EMVA’s Director of Market Research and adds: “Integrators play a significant role in the industrial use of machine vision, while the non-industrial sector is at least as important to the machine vision players and strongly growing also fostered by heavy computer vision research in practically all relevant universities across the country.”

In Ireland foreign direct investment is a pillar to the economy as many multinational end-users operate production sites in the country. Many of those are machine vision users. In addition, over the last decade Ireland has become a globally recognized center of excellence in the Life Sciences industry. Other than smart cameras, the main part of machine vision components is imported into Ireland. Notably, there is an extremely dynamic scene of companies which purely concentrate on non-industrial computer vision applications.

“Altogether we have identified close to 300 players in the UK machine vision market and over 40 players in the Irish machine vision market, all of them are listed by name and website in the report,” says Andreas Breyer.

With the current 2016 market report the EMVA continues the strategy to investigate all European markets through the eyes of the machine vision industry. EMVA non-members can obtain the 59 paged pdf-report at a price of € 345,- plus VAT through info@emva.org.