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FROM THE CEO SHANE INFANTI – Chief Executive Officer AMTIL
Looking back on eight years of import stats I know this may be considered as dry and uninteresting, and I certainly get that, but this is our industry right in front of us, so I would encourage you all to just give it a few minutes to peruse the recent trends in machine tool investment. I consider technology suppliers to be a barometer for industry confidence, that is if confidence is high then businesses are more likely to invest in their future and if it is low … well it goes without saying too much. Now it should be very well known by all that it has become tougher over the last few years, but look at the past 12 months and it is clearly evident in the import data that things are turning around. Combine that with the sustained strength of the Australian PMI as indicated by the Ai Group and we can safely say business confidence and investment are at an eight-year high. AMTIL has been collecting import statistics for many years. Of all the data collected, I will extract the most recent eight years – the 2011 to 2018 calendar years – and only for a selection of technology listed below. If we look at the list below, you can see it is broken into two lists: a machining technology list and a fabrication technology list. I have done this because it was easier to get a quick handle on the situation and rough trends. • Machining technology • CNC Horizontal Lathe • CNC Machining Centre • Fabrication technology • CNC Laser and Photon Beam • CNC Bending, Folding, Straightening and Flattening
It is incumbent for me to insist you are aware the data is collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics via the various machine agencies importing paperwork. AMTIL knows it is not perfect and we do our best to filter out the obvious errors. I think it would be good for you to draw your own conclusions from this data, and please don’t think this is the extent of what we have. AMTIL members are able to login to our website and download the complete statistics, unpack and dissect it any way you want. This was just a result of a moment in time where I was interested to see what the statistics might show. What they indicate is a positive position for investment in manufacturing technology in this country and one that we hope will continue over the coming years.
250
200 CNC Bending, Folding, Straightening and Flattening
150
CNC Horizontal Lathe CNC Laser or Photon Beam
100
CNC Machining Centre 50
0 2011
Year
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018 (projected)
CNC Bending, CNC Horizontal Laser or CNC Machining CNC Machining Total Grand Total CNC Bending, Folding, CNC Horizontal Lathe CNC Laser orCNC Photon Centre Grand Folding Straightening Lathe Photon Beam Centre Straightening and Beam and Flattening Flattening
2011 147 Year 2011 147 2012 131 2012 131 2013 134 2013 134 2014 125 2014 125 2015 102 2015 102 2016 121 2016 121 2017 135 2017 135 2018 208 2018(projected) (projected) 208
AMT DEC/JAN 2019
142 54 143 486
142 54 143 170 53 163 517 486 107 170
163 53 53 87 381 517 107 53 87 381 87 41 83 336 87 41 83 336 94 39 92 327 94 39 92 327 113 45 129 408 408 113 45 129 132 48 151 466 466 132 48 151 110 61 170 110 61 170 549 549