With consumers beginning to seek customization and autonomous consumption and the lack of labor becoming a growing problem at the manufacturing end, manufacturers are spurred to become adaptive to a quickly-shifting and widely-varying environment as manufacturing systems become more sophisticated than ever. Thanks to the ripened, new technology, manufacturers may deploy advanced sensing technology in conjunction with AI algorithms and robots to raise information visibility and system controllability, furthering the development of smart manufacturing for Industry 4.0. According to forecasts by TrendForce, the global market scale for smart manufacturing will register a CAGR of 10.7% up to 2022 and near US$370 billion.
According to TrendForce , electric cars have already become the main motivator for growth of the future car industry, and are expected to exceed 8 million units in 2021, twice the amount of shipments for 2018. Apart from batteries and engines, IGBT power components are ranked as the most important among key electric car components, being used in numbers 5 to 10 times that of traditional internal combustion engines. These modules may therefore bring about continual growth of total IGBT market revenue, which is projected to go beyond the US$5.2 billion mark.
Global research institute TrendForce asserts in its latest Global Automotive Market Decode for 1Q report that the global automotive market scale is predicted to reach 94.4 million in shipments 2019, a 0.8% decrease compared to 2018. Despite this drop in market scale, car manufacturers are hoping to spur market development by turning to the electric vehicle market. Electric vehicle shipments are predicted to arrive at 5.15 million in 2019, reaching a YoY growth of 28%. YoY growth of new energy vehicles alone ( excluding hybrid electric vehicles) is expected to hit 51%.
According to the latest research by EnergyTrend, a division of TrendForce, the market of new energy vehicle will continue to grow steadily, driving the demand for xEV batteries, despite the slowdown in global automotive market since 2018. The global demand for lithium-ion batteries used in new energy passenger cars is estimated to reach 155GWh in 2019, a growth of 63% from 95GWh in 2018.
LED companies have been keeping low stocking due to the sluggish demand in the end markets in 2018 and impacts of the China-US trade war, according to LEDinside, a division of TrendForce. Looking ahead to 2019, the overall industry still has risks of oversupply, but demands for niche applications, including fine-pitch LED digital display, Mini LED backlight, UV-C LED, automotive lighting and high-efficiency lighting LED, have a positive outlook and may drive the market growth in the future.