Why aren’t more UK manufacturers investing in automation?

What does it mean to you, Lee, and to Starrag as a company?

I think for us, and I'm going to speak particularly for the UK here, automation has to be the way forward for us.

So we supply very high-end equipment.

On the small end, I mentioned the MedTech market, the small BoomerTech machines come with inbuilt automation.

Going up to the large end, we've got 20-metre machines, 20-metre long machines for aerostructure components where we automate.

And then the machining centres in the middle tend to be left out a little bit.

We've got twin pallet machines, but every machine we sell ought to have some kind of robot tending or automation system sat in front of it so it can run 24-7.

OK, Oliver, same question to you.

Yeah, so we're fairly strong as FANUC within the machine tool automation globally.

You probably hold roughly 50% of the market share for machine tool applications with robots, which is really fantastic.

And we probably saw that earlier this year at Mac.

What I would say though is the UK does drag behind the west of the European competition, the global competition in investing in that automation up front with those machine tools to increase what effectively is important the spindle time.

Okay, now we're gonna dive into all of these points about why that is, where we sit, why we think we sit where we sit, what we could do differently.

So if you are watching or listening to this, whichever platform you're on, we're always welcome to your comments and contributions because at the end of the day, we're all involved in UK manufacturing and part of global manufacturing.

We want the sector to do better here and we all believe sitting here that automation is a big part of that.

And some statistics here.

So, you know, I mean, how does the UK fare when it comes to automation? Yeah.

So as part of one of my voluntary roles as the chair for the British Automation Robotics Association, we sort of do a lot of analysis and try and provide some insight into the UK government, to the UK stakeholders in what it looks like.

So currently the UK is 24th in the world in one of the key metrics, which is robot density per 10,000 manufacturing workers.

We currently have roughly 112 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, but we're 24th in the world.

And I think as part of some of Lee's research in terms of where we sit in terms of global output for manufacturing, although I think we're 11th in the world for manufacturing output in billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, we sit a long way down that list in terms of robot density, which is a sort of an internationally recognized metric.

Yeah, I mean that list that we mentioned here.

Yeah, you state we're 11th, but you've got China is number one, the United States is two, Japan is three, Germany is number four, South Korea is number five, India six, Mexico seven, Italy eight, France is ninth, and Brazil is 10th.

Now there's some nations in there clearly we would expect to be bigger manufacturing nations than us.

But there's also a few in there that we probably wouldn't leave.