Stagnation – a good thing?

Under normal circumstances we’d like to see rising demand for machine vision technology. But, as you well know, these are not normal times. So it’s actually quite encouraging to read that the machine vision market is expected to be stagnant in 2009. (The information comes from the VDMA, and was reported in “Test & Measurement World,” January 26th, 2009.)

I should stress that it’s revenues that are forecast to be flat. The bad news is that, as there seems to be no end to the stream of machine vision-related start ups, increased capacity is going to cause margin erosion. I suspect the net result will be some industry consolidation later in the year as companies move to cut overheads.

Remember, you read it here first!