Influenced by Govt. policies like Make in India, Digital India, Skill India and many more manufacturing facilities in India is feeling encouraged and the same confidence in visible in foreigners investors. India is largest consumer market for gadgets and electronics items, and have a huge scope for In-house designed articles. In-house designing as expected if encouraged specially in R&D and A&D, will provide a bright market to Test and Measurement equipment market in India.
Growth in the Indian test and measurement market has been driven by the global demand. The domestic demand has seen growth trend since year 2011 to make the test and measurement market realize opportunities from every sector.
As per Market & Market research, The Communication Test and Measurement market is estimated to grow from USD 4.28 Billion in 2015 to USD 6.69 Billion by 2020 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.3% from 2015 to 2020. Ongoing research and development on cellular technologies such as LTE and LTE-A, and wired technologies such as Ethernet and Fiber Optics, providing speed up to 400 Gbps, are the major communication technologies, driving this market. The growing demand for automated products and increasing telecommunications spending are the main drivers of the market. The growing demand for test and measurement rental services offers great opportunity for communication test and measurement suppliers.
The demand for pervasive wireless communication is stimulating the physical constrictions positioned upon the current communication systems. The preliminary phase of equipment design requires laborious testing to confirm system interoperability. The communication test and measurement market can be well-defined as unified test equipment (hardware and software) and services used by communication network operators and equipment manufacturers that function on broadband or IP networks and arrange threefold and quad-play services, such as voice, data, video, and wireless services. A wireless test solution is expected to have the largest market share in the test solutions segment from 2015 to 2020. Field network test is expected to play a key role in changing the communication test and measurement landscape and will grow at the highest growth rate during the forecast period as end-users consider the test to be reliable as it allows users to make changes in a controlled environment.
The communication test and measurement solutions are being increasingly adopted by end-users, such as enterprises, telecommunication service providers, Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEM’s) and mobile device manufacturers which have led to the growth of the market across the globe. The telecommunication service provider is expected to dominate the communication test and measurement end-user market, contributing the largest market share during the forecast period. The market is also projected to witness growth for NEM’s during the forecast period.
North America is expected to have the largest market share and dominate the communication test and measurement market from 2015 to 2020. Asia-pacific (APAC) offers potential growth opportunities, as end-users such as enterprises and mobile device manufacturers are turning towards communication test and measurement providers to offer a high degree of service in terms of quality, performance, and capacity.
However, due to price sensitivity of test and measurement equipment and the need to manage new technological changes is restraining the growth of the market. The major vendors in this market include IXIA, Octoscope, EXFO, Danaher Corporation, Agilent Technologies, Anritsu, and Viavi Solutions among various others. These players adopted various strategies, such as new product developments, mergers, partnerships, collaborations, and business expansion to cater to the needs of the communication test and measurement market. Other stakeholders of the communication test and measurement market include chip manufacturers, antenna manufacturers, network engineers, network administrators, network application developers, video equipment providers, cable providers, suppliers, channel partners, and government organizations.
Key drivers for T&M Market:
- Increasing complexity of devices to be designed, produced and deployed by manufacturing companies is requiring an unprecedented level of knowledge from the users of test equipment
- Increasing industry maturity in developed regions demands a change in customer reach strategies for market participants
The economic downturn of 2008-2009 is still impacting the test strategies of customers, forcing companies to look beyond selling capital equipment and consider alternative ways of acquiring test equipment
Key markets in 2016
Smart cloud computing – Unexplored opportunity
The next paradigm shift in cloud computing will be the advent of smart clouds. These flexible customized clouds can address a particular business (or personal) need for a specific period of time and can be integrated with the existing on-premise IT infrastructure base — seamlessly and securely. This new cloud momentum is expected to throw open new business models leading to a confluence of new technological applications and opportunities for software vendors. The need for smart cloud compatible test and monitoring equipment is expected to increase exponentially by 2020 because of the following reasons:
- Financial services and retail services will all be using Clouds for either in store or online shopping. It is crucial to ensure that the services operate flawlessly because of the time criticality of the money transactions. A network delay of couple of minutes will result in trillions in lost revenues for banks and financial institutions.
- The reason for companies to switch to Cloud was attributed to significant infrastructure and energy cost savings. Because of that, it will be required for test equipment to be as ‘green’ as possible in terms of recyclability and energy consumption.
- There will be an increased demand for more intuitive virtual test and monitoring tools to test the smart cloud
- There will be embedded testing tools offered to go with the telecommunications equipment
- Monitoring applications will be primarily intuitive, real-time passive ones that will pinpoint and fix the network impairments immediately in a matter of seconds
Robots and Factory Automation
Fully-automated factories are now approaching reality. Sophisticated machines, intelligent robots infused with future technologies will soon allow a plethora of machinery to rapidly manufacture and fabricate products on-demand, without any human intervention. The entire production line will be configured with artificial intelligence, allowing direct access and control to different machinery in the manufacturing process. Designing customized solution for industrial, commercial and domestic applications have enhanced R&D of robotic projects and usage of T&M equipments.
Wireless intelligence
Wireless technology enabled by advancements in cellular networks, satellite networks, RFID, Wi-Fi, and WiMax, will lead to IT infrastructure and other services to be 80 per cent wireless on a single, integrated platform by 2020. With real-time video surveillance, virtual monitoring; and secure, high-speed, wireless data networking, this intelligence will be managed by a central server, which commands different emergency services to detect, react, prepare, respond, and even predict events. Around 10 billion devices will be connected by broadband in 2020 with innovative applications in healthcare, business, education, and entertainment sectors. Evolving artificial intelligence (AI) and broadband technologies will lead to sophistication of major applications resulting in virtual companies, business conferences, defense simulation, virtual classroom, and even virtual space tours to name a few.
2016 bazaar overview
Global market for General Purpose Electronic Test and Measurement Instruments is projected to reach US$6.8 billion by 2020, driven by technology developments, expanding end-use applications, growing need for validating the functioning and performance of equipment, and stringent quality, safety, and environmental standards for manufacturing, maintenance, and use of equipment. Electronic Test and Measurement (T&M) instruments are indispensable tools for validating functioning and performance of a wide gamut of electronic products. Electronic Test and Measurement Instruments find widespread use across the entire spectrum of the manufacturing process right from product design, development and architecture to production testing, and pre and post market testing & support.
With electronic gadgets shrinking in size, featuring advanced wireless capabilities, and gaining in complexity, testing has become a vital process in manufacturing. The growing focus being shed on production testing to enable timely defect elimination and prevent late stage equipment failure, is benefiting demand for T&M instruments. Testing in manufacturing, maintenance and support now are as crucial as opportunities in research and development. Key benefits driving the adoption of T&M instruments in product R&D, production and maintenance include high product quality, and lower costs associated with product malfunctions, repairs, replacements, product call backs and repeat production.
Stringent and rigorous quality, safety, and environment standards worldwide for manufacturing, maintenance, and use of equipment will help drive growth in the market. While military and aerospace remains the primary end-use market, emerging applications in communications, semiconductor manufacturing, Automotive electronics, biotechnology, and IT hardware, are poised to fuel future growth in the market. Driven by growing medical implant surgeries and ensuing rise in demand for prosthetics, bio-medical engineering applications including testing of medical equipment are especially poised to hold strong potential for growth. In the coming years, growth in the electronic T&M instruments market will be driven by the need to design, and develop cutting edge new generation products calibrated to meet changing requirements of new and emerging technologies in end-use markets. Future growth will also stem from technology developments and new product launches in key end-use markets. In the communication end-use market, for instance, the much-anticipated transition to 4G networks generate opportunities for growth and in the semiconductor industry, innovations in semiconductor designs and launch of new bus technology will stimulate growth.
As stated by the new market research report on General Purpose Electronic Test & Measurement Instruments, the United States represents the largest regional market worldwide. Asia-Pacific is forecast to emerge as the fastest growing market with a CAGR of 7.4% over the analysis period. Growth in the region is driven by huge population, rising disposable incomes, increasing manufacturing activity, thriving telecom sector, and strong penetration of advanced mobile devices in several Asian countries such as China, Korea, Malaysia, and India. Signal Generators represents the fastest growing product market driven by the development of 3.5-GHz frequency spectrum in WiMAX communications systems, and increase in use of advanced technologies such as Bluetooth WCDMA, GSM, EDGE, and 3G wireless.
To address the trends in New Year locally, several test and measurement vendors have taken up software-defined instrumentation, which is a significant trend in test and measurement. The end users, who are engineers, are using software-defined instrumentation to achieve different levels of performance and lower costs by applying the latest technological advancements such as multi-core processing and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in their test systems to meet the demands of new wireless and protocol tests. The Frost & Sullivan research shows that software-defined instruments, also known as virtual instruments, consist of modular hardware and user-defined software. This gives engineers the ability and flexibility to combine standard and user-defined measurements with custom data processing using common hardware components. This important feature has become extremely critical, as electronic devices such as next-generation devices, like smart phones including 3G and 4G, adopt different communications standards. Software-defined instrumentation can enable an engineer to quickly configure and reconfigure their measurement algorithms in the software to meet testing requirements. The open, modular architecture of software-defined instruments, such as those in PXI, have proven beneficial to a wide range of industries. As a result, PXI revenue in measurement and automation is expected to grow at CAGR of 17.6 per cent through 2014. The performance delivered by the PXI platform has successfully addressed areas such as RF applications in radar testing, mobile phone testing, and other wireless applications that were previously impossible to address with other instrumentation techniques.
Summary
Due to the flexibility and use of software, test and measurement instruments are growing in use and are expected to have a significant impact on the market. Given the penetration levels of connected devices and their services, companies are competing to provide higher levels of quality of service (QoS) and comply with service level agreements. Today, the Indian industry is witnessing a key trend of increased quality consciousness, lean processes and an inclination towards energy savings. The realization that energy saved can be turned into profits is growing with the times. The growth in the telecom, automation, electronics and education sectors, along with the increasing defense spending are the prime factors influencing the growth of T&M market. Investments from government and private players are also expected to grow over the next few years. New government initiatives like ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ are further going to drive this growth. Also, emerging wireless technologies have accelerated manifold opportunities for the communications T&M industry with many companies now investing on developing in-house R&D facilities.
T&M markets are being driven by the rise of virtualization, automation and expanded wireless and wireline conversions along with the anticipated turn to 5G technology. As these markets continue to evolve, information analytics will play a significant role in 5G and Internet of Things (IoT), E2E self-optimizing networks (SON) and software defined networks (SDN). For hybrid and fully virtualized networks, the prevalence of video services and applications is leading to the exponential growth of Internet traffic resulting in a transition from movable sensors to cloud data analytics that will help fuel growth in the telecom sector.
