Market for industrial automation devices will nearly triple by 2025

The market for industrial-automation control and field-device shipments will reach 146 million units by 2025, up from an estimated 2017 total of 55 million units, according to a study released Thursday.

In dollar terms, that would translate to $298 billion in industrial-automation device revenue by 2025, with $45 billion attributed to robotics, according to ABI Research, a market research firm in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

The automotive sector will continue to generate the bulk of demand for all classes of industrial automation components as it applies control and field devices for automation technologies used in manufacturing, ABI said. Other users include manufacturers such as food producers and non-manufacturing industries, including logistics.

Another center of automation growth is the Asia-Pacific region, where manufacturers led by China are using the technology to adjust to increasing regulation and rising wages, Philip Solis, research director at ABI Research, said in a release.

"Regional manufacturers are now relying on automation to try to offset a dramatic rise in Chinese worker wages and combat the declining numbers of age-appropriate employees in the workforce," Solis said. "Labor pool variability is another key growth factor that will undoubtedly lead to increased levels of automation technology among Chinese manufacturers in the coming years."

Measured by revenue, one of the fastest-growing portions of the automation industry could be high-end robotics. Vendors expect to ship slightly more than 300,000 units of industrial robots—a subset of industrial-automation field devices—in 2017.

"Control and field devices from the likes of Emerson, Honeywell, and Siemens are used to integrate disparate technologies, as well as regulate, manage, and accomplish industrial automation," Solis said. "Robots from companies like ABB, Fanuc Corp., Kuka Robotics Corp., and Yaskawa Electric Corp. make up a small fraction of yearly industrial automation-device shipments, but account for a disproportionally large amount of revenue due to their high costs."