The European Vision Technology Market Statistics are a unique source of detailed information on the machine vision industry in Europe. With the core chapter of the report being a detailed analysis of machine vision sales out of Europe as well as an overview about European market and industry trends, the study has been continuously complemented by qualitative information on specific European countries.

Based on the comprehensive quantitative data gathered through a questionnaire sent out to hundreds of machine vision companies each year, five years ago the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) has begun to expand its annual industry study "European Vision Technology Market Statistics". Analyzing the total European machine vision industry on a regular basis, it had become clear that a closer look into the specific countries in Europe will provide valuable information in addition to the existing analysis of industry as a whole. With a separate analysis of the German market already in place, a strategy has been set up to successively cover the major machine vision markets in Europe and dedicate to each of them their own chapter within the study, covering both quantitative and qualitative data.

Industry volume

A prime motivation to cover more and more European markets by specific country reports is to eventually be able to provide a valid extrapolation of the total volume of machine vision industry in Europe. Already, such extrapolations of the industry volumes are being done for Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, and Benelux. The machine vision industry in these countries or regions has been investigated intensively in order to provide a data base of close to all enterprises active in the field of machine vision in the respective country by name, activity and size. Only then can the data gathered directly from the companies through the questionnaire be extrapolated into valid industry size estimation. The methodology used to extrapolate the national market volumes complements the data returned by the companies with expert opinions upon the size of machine vision companies that did not return the questionnaire and to identify hitherto unknown companies. This, together with an extensive desktop research using commercial registers, internet databases, information from corporate websites, national associations and cluster organizations, provides the basis for a very comprehensive coverage of the machine vision players in the respective country. These data is supplemented and validated by telephone interviews and expert opinions gathered during workshops and trade shows. This also includes a series of personal, qualitative in-depth interviews of selected key players along the machine vision value chain in the respective countries.

Market particularities

After four years of experience with the country-specific reports, it has become evident that the machine vision industry is far from being homogenous across Europe. Instead, each country report we conducted revealed specific peculiarities which distinguish the respective market from other European markets. This includes all relevant parameters to qualify the machine industry in a given market, such as size, number of companies, manufacturing penetration of these companies, applications they provide and the industries they serve. For instance, the UK machine vision industry has only very few manufacturers of vision components and relies to a great length on imports. As to customer industries, the automotive industry is a key driver of machine vision technology and is a major reason for the German machine vision market being the number one in Europe. Yet, the customer structure of most other machine vision markets in Europe is much more diverse: In France, the aeronautic industry plays a much larger role for machine vision enterprises than automotive customers; machine vision for agriculture on the other hand is primarily found in the Netherlands.

New players

In a still fairly young and heterogeneous industry such as the machine vision industry, there is continuous movement and a rather high volatility. Thus, another positive result of the close investigation of the to-date five markets is that a good number of new companies could be identified in each of these regions. These companies were either new on the market or not visible until then since they are specialized on certain niches or only act within a local or regional radius, e.g. small integrators. In an ever increasing number of applications in new fields and sectors, there will always be new market entries which need to be monitored in order to observe the development of the whole industry.

European characteristics

Other characteristics of a country-specific machine vision market are the level of collaboration between research and the industry, and also more general economic factors such as the significance of industrial production, services and farming, respectively, in the economy; its export orientation, and whether there are geographic industry clusters which offer opportunities to the machine vision sector to specialize. Each of these characteristics influences the way a domestic machine vision market is set up and will further develop. Accumulating and analyzing this data step-by-step helps to understand the structure of the European machine vision industry as a whole.

About the Statistics

The "European Vision Technology Market Statistics" is an annual study issued by the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA). The core of the study is based on a questionnaire that is sent out to the companies of the European machine vision industry, which results are then supplemented by numerous expert interviews. The 2012 edition contains data from 247 companies. There is no other market study available for machine vision that can compare with this wealth of relevant first-hand data.