On the occasion of the MV China trade exhibition in Shanghai, the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society (CMES) and the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) signed an agreement on March 24, 2009, in order to establish and to expand their future cooperation. The focus of the cooperation will address most areas of association work and includes public relations, regular exchange of information, mutual support in organizing conferences and industry delegations, standardization as well as market analysis and statistics. In this context, EMVA will assist to establish an annual machine vision survey for China with a view to global harmonization of machine vision statistics. Furthermore, EMVA has reinforced its partnership with the annual MV China exhibition in Shanghai. At the MV China 2009, the EMVA organized a successful industry delegation to the exhibition for the first time. Overall the agreement emphasizes the economic importance of the Chinese market for the machine vision industry. Machine vision has become a key technology for the Chinese manufacturing sector which is also reflected by the fact that the CMES has recently launched a Machine Vision Group.

During the ceremonial signing Gabriele Jansen, President of EMVA, commented: “The Chinese market for machine vision products and equipment gains more and more importance for a lot of EMVA member companies. I am very happy that in CMES we found a cooperation partner that represents machine vision companies, research institutes and end users of the technology as well. The increase and the new quality of our information exchange and mutual support will benefit the members of both our associations significantly.” Mr. Zhang Yanmin, General Secretary of CMES, said: “There is a great potential for Machine Vision in industry. CMES has built a close relationship with EMVA. Both parties will benefit from this. And I do hope that we can explore the Chinese market together by means of exchanging information and recommending advanced technologies from Europe and other parts of the world to China for companies.”