Change for the better, or for change's sake?
15 Jan 2000
If anyone ever doubted the strength of the UK manufacturing sector, they should pay a visit to the NEC in Birmingham this month. There, over the course of the week beginning April 27, will be major trade shows covering most areas of manufacturing from design engineering, through machine tools and metalworking, to automation for manufacture, and process control and instrumentation.
PE's interest in this jamboree is in the Control & Instrumentation UK show, covered in our supplement starting on page 31. Changes in control technologies and in the structure of the control industry (see pages 10 and 12) are happening with such frequency these days that even an annual occasion like the C&I Show can find itself overtaken by events. Given some of the more recent developments, this year will probably be no exception, which should at least ensure continuing interest in next year's show.
The pace of change elsewhere in the process industries is not quite so frantic, of course. Catalysis research, for example, (see page 23) continues at a rate which, if not exactly sedate, is at least more attuned to the innate conservatism of a chemical industry that can take a long-term view of its technological investments. The 10-year success story of BP Chemicals' Innovene polyethylene process is a case in point (see page 24).
Not that the chemical industry is immune to change; it merely takes longer than, say, a new release of Windows to have an impact in its own markets. This view is borne out by a new report from industry analysts MarketLine International. European Chemical and Pharmaceutical Contracting predicts that this particular sector of the process contracting industry, currently worth $15.3 billion, will only grow at an average of around 2-3 per cent, to some $16.9 billion, between now and 2001.
According to MarketLine, however, pharmaceutical manufacturers have not been major customers for the global contractors, since their own in-house engineering expertise, combined with that of smaller specialist engineering companies, has been more than adequate for most projects. But the rapidly growing field of contract chemical manufacture to which a growing number of pharmaceutical companies are outsourcing production lacks that in-house process knowledge and, says MarketLine, will increasingly turn to the contractors for expertise.
Good news, then, for the big players (seven of which currently make up over half the European market); but bad news for the smaller contractors and specialist engineering companies.
* While we're on the subject of change: please note our new address and contact details in the masthead panel on this page. From 6 April we relocate to London's Docklands after nearly a quarter of a century downriver in Woolwich.
