Italy towards the turning point 4.0.
The market of Industry 4.0 projects in Italy in 2017 – between IT solutions, enabling technology components on traditional production assets and related services – reaches a value between 2.3 and 2.4 billion euro, of which 84% realized towards Italian companies and the rest as exports, showing an increase of 30% compared to last year which: read in a multiannual perspective, ratifies the almost doubling of the market in just three years. The 4.0 projects include an induction of around 400 million euros in “traditional” digital innovation projects.
These are some of the results of the research of the Industry 4.0 Observatory of the School of Management of the Milan Polytechnic. The Industrial IoT (referring to the only components to connect the machinery to the network) confirms itself as the most widespread 4.0 technology, with a value of around 1.4 billion euros (60% of the market, + 30% on the previous year).
Following Industrial Analytics with 410 million euros (20% of the market, + 25%) and Cloud Manufacturing with 200 million euros (10% of the market, + 35%), but among the first for growth.
8% of the market is represented by Advanced Automation solutions (145 million euros, + 20%), while the Advanced Human Machine Interface, even with a low total value (around 30 million euros), is the first for growth compared to last year (+ 50%).
Among the IT solutions, enabling technological components and related services, the project market has a value of 2,400 million euros.
90% covers industrial IoT, Analytics and Cloud Manufacturing.
The national plan is bearing fruit. Now focus on SMEs.
The photograph taken by the Industry 4.0 Observatory of the School of Management of the Milan Polytechnic
The level of knowledge increases on Industry 4.0: only 2.5% of the companies say they do not know the topic (two years ago it was almost 40%); 15% are in the exploratory phase, while 55% say they have already implemented 4.0 solutions: numbers that bear witness to the ferment of the Italian scenario of Industry 4.0, in which a good level of basic technology “literacy” (on average 90% of companies know the individual Smart Technologies).
The impact of the National Industry 4.0 Plan appears very positive: on a sample of 236 companies, 92% know the measures (84% a year ago), half say they have already used hyper and super-amortization for the renewal of their assets and one in four plans to do so shortly.
The distribution of investments that exploit these forms of incentive is varied, with 25% of the companies investing more than three million euros and 20% that has appropriated less than 200 thousand euros. With reference to the tax credit foreseen for 4.0 training, six out of ten companies declare that they will want to take advantage of it.
“Over the past two years, the market for industrial digitalisation has almost doubled, driven by a modern industrial policy and reinforced by incentives, while the awareness of Industry 4.0 and the knowledge of new technologies are now widespread in almost all the productive realities of the country – explain Alessandro Perego, Andrea Sianesi and Marco Taisch, Scientific Managers of the Industry 4.0 Observatory – Now it is necessary that every company align this digital maturity to its business objectives, starting from the fact that new technologies are the foundation of Industry 4.0 and not its point of arrival, rethinking processes and organizational models in the difficult balance between operational management, continuous improvement and radical innovation “.
“The National Plan has played an excellent role as an accelerator of the transformation 4.0 so far, both by spreading their knowledge and by favouring private investments in fiscal terms,” Perego, Sianesi and Taisch continue, “but it is likely that their stimulus can not continue. indefinitely: the next big challenge to consolidate and keep growing in the market will be to identify the right path to involve SMEs, which represent the true heart of Italian manufacturing, in the digital transformation. ”
Source: CORCOM
