Sumitomo (SHI) Demag adapts competencies amid market crisis
Under the continuous weakening market environment, Sumitomo (SHI) Demag adapts and adjusts its core competencies and production capacities to support customers and wider industry transformation in the automotive, electronics and construction industries.
Management team of Sumitomo (SHI) Demag.
With global production network including sites in Germany, Japan and China, Sumitomo (SHI) Demag diversifies its relative strengths in order to yield cost reductions and efficiency gains, with the Germany site focuses on engineering and automation expertise.
The company is realistic about the investment headwinds that lie ahead. The market weakness results from a further decline in investment willingness in the automotive, electronics and construction industries.
“In the medium term, a revival of investment activity in these sectors is not expected. The slumps being experienced have been exacerbated by market conditions beyond our control,” said Christian Maget, CEO of Sumitomo (SHI) Demag.
“There is a clear competitive advantage for basing our areas of expertise in these production-experienced locations and benefitting from established supply chains. The current market challenges have simply urged us to re-evaluate and pull these plans forward by a couple of years,” he explained.
New production framework with the company’s Japanese headquarters and production sites in China offers multiple benefits. The cost reductions and efficiency improvements not only accelerate machine build throughput times, but also improves global availability of the company’s all-electric machine portfolio.
These also allows Sumitomo (SHI) Demag to adapt to changing market momentums more fluidly and expand its global reach.
“We do not see any current market recovery in the mentioned sectors either this or next year. Since the market crisis in the injection moulding machine sector is not limited to Germany, but affects large parts of Europe, the USA and China, we can no longer compensate through our international business,” commented Anatol Sattel, CSO of the Sumitomo (SHI) Demag.
“This gives us a distinct strategic and customer-focused advantage as it allows for agile production and localised automation and mass-customisations based on customer and service demands. Although the archetype model for building machines is constantly changing, all-electric remains our competitive and efficiency advantage,” he added.
