As the main battlefield in the field of industrial automation control, PLC provides very reliable control applications for various automated control equipment, meeting the current automation needs of industrial enterprises. On the other hand, PLC must also rely on other new technologies to cope with the impact of gradually shrinking market share, especially industrial PCs.
The market size of PLC in China is expected to reach 16.54 billion yuan in 2023.
At present, the basic programming software for PLC can be summarized into four forms:
It has developed from a self-developed PLC kernel based on international standards to an integrated development environment (IDE), but it does not take commercialization as the goal, only serving its own control systems or customized control systems.
It has developed from a self-developed PLC kernel based on international standards to an integrated development environment (IDE), with the main feature of being productized, which can provide commercial software kits for any unit in society with needs.
Cooperating with foreign companies to develop an integrated development environment suitable for the needs of the domestic industrial control market based on their PLC kernels, including providing a complete software environment and development path for domestic embedded chips.
A software platform completely based on self-development and the latest technologies in the IT industry. It is characterized by not only meeting the various requirements of traditional PLC programming, but also adapting to the requirements of modern PLC applications in the industrial Internet environment, and facilitating the introduction of artificial intelligence.
In the market aspect, the domestic PLC market has currently formed a scale of tens of billions of yuan. Under the premise of policy guidance, technological breakthroughs, and continuous release of market demand, the market space and import substitution demand for medium and large PLCs will definitely be opened up, and investment opportunities will also become more and more. Industry authoritative assessments show that it is expected that by 2023, the market size of PLC in China is expected to reach 16.54 billion yuan, among which the market sizes of small PLCs and medium and large PLCs are 8.072 billion yuan and 8.468 billion yuan respectively.
The supply of high-end products in China is insufficient, and the country needs to accelerate the process of PLC localization.
At present, the issues that PLC needs to address still include the adoption of new technologies, system openness, and pricing.
With the expansion of industrial production scale and the improvement of automation levels in the production of general basic products, the cost-performance advantage has become more significant, significantly enhancing competitiveness in the global mid-to-low-end market and driving a rapid growth in export volume. It is noteworthy that China's PLC import volume has also maintained a relatively stable increase, mainly due to the insufficient supply of domestic high-end products. The continuous development of downstream traditional industries and emerging industries has driven growing demand for high-end PLC products, leading to a sustained increase in industry imports.
From the perspective of global supply and demand market trends, in recent two years, affected by factors such as chip shortages and rising raw material prices, the upward trend in PLC market prices has been very evident. Since last year, global PLC giants have successively initiated price hikes. Among them, the price increase range for Rockwell's PLC products has varied from 3% to 36%, with the CLX1756-L8SP series—boasting huge market sales—seeing a 36% price surge. Price increases for products under foreign-funded enterprises such as Omron, Delta, and Emerson have also exceeded 6%.
Domestic brand PLCs account for a very small share of the domestic PLC market and have not yet formed an industrial scale, mainly concentrating in the field of small PLCs. In Q3 2022, the localization rate of small PLCs was approximately 20.2%, that of medium and large PLCs was below 10%, and the localization rate of large PLC systems was only about 1%.
Over the years, China's PLC technology has also made remarkable progress. There are few traces of imitation in both hardware and software directions, and independent development and self-design have become the mainstream.
In the field of domestic industrial infrastructure, the call for localization and intelligence of PLCs, especially medium and large PLCs, is getting louder and louder, which also brings opportunities for the local PLC industry to overtake on a curve. In recent years, with domestic industrial control enterprises continuing to make efforts in product technology research and development and market promotion, many local brands such as Inovance, Delta, SUPCON, HollySys, Yonghong, Ankong, Taian, Fengwei, Aoto, Xinjie, Kewei, Zhenghang and others have actively expanded the market. Kaiyuan Securities said in the latest research report that domestic manufacturers are seizing the market share of Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturers in the small PLC market by virtue of the advantages of high cost performance, short delivery time and rapid response to customer needs. Many of the leading domestic PLC enterprises have been listed on the A-share market. Driven by the continuous development needs of emerging industries and traditional industries, the downstream application fields of the PLC industry are also showing a diversified development trend. In particular, domestic industries such as power batteries, automobiles, semiconductors, as well as traditional manufacturing industries such as textiles and machinery, have become key markets for the future development of the PLC industry
In the era of intelligent manufacturing, PLC technology urgently needs innovative optimization.
Furthermore, at the technical level, with the continuous deepening of intelligent manufacturing, the algorithms of PLC software need to be further optimized for the production requirements of Industry 4.0. Based on the integration of artificial intelligence and big data, the PLC industry should further optimize software to provide tools more in line with actual industry applications, enhance the problem-solving capabilities of industrial algorithms, and reduce algorithm complexity. Additionally, as a tool to assist industrial manufacturing, the underlying programs of PLC should be further encapsulated into concise and easy-to-use toolkits, providing simple interfaces for technicians to call, so as to simplify the operation of complex production processes.
In recent years, with the continuous popularization and application of cloud computing in the industrial field, the deployment of cloud-based PLCs in 5G base stations has injected new vitality into this traditional PLC technology. Based on their technical advantages in 5G, the three major telecom operators have strengthened cooperation with traditional industrial control enterprises to lay out "5G + cloud-based PLC" solutions, striving to seize the intelligent manufacturing market. In 2020, China Telecom carried out a distributed deployment transformation of traditional factory PLCs for Midea's microwave oven production line, adopting 5G network-based centralized PLC deployment. In 2021, China Unicom, Tongtu Technology, and Sany Heavy Industry joined forces to grandly release the 5G cloud-based PLC application for the global lighthouse factory. In June 2022, the China Mobile Research Institute, China Mobile's Enterprise Business Division, together with Comba Network and Tongtu Technology, launched the industry's first 5G cloud-based industrial base station and completed end-to-end verification.
Your message must be between 20-3,000 characters!
