1.2 Current situation of domestic PLC market

With the steady progress of Made in China 2025, the demand for automation systems continues to grow, as the core equipment of discrete control, the domestic PLC market scale is increasing year by year, as shown in Figure 2, from 6.024 billion yuan in 2010 to 12.430 billion yuan in 2020 (excluding distributed IO products, the PLC market size is 10.850 billion yuan). The average annual growth rate for 10 years was 7.51 percent.

Figure 2. The change trend of domestic PLC market size from 2010 to 2020

E1100 According to the PLC model analysis, the market of large PLC in 10 years has not changed much, fluctuating up and down in the scale of 1.1 billion yuan/year, but with the development of the pan-medium-sized trend, the performance of medium-sized PLC has been continuously enhanced, and some application scenarios of large PLC have been replaced by medium-sized PLC, resulting in a steady and slightly declining trend of large PLC market. The medium-sized PLC market grew steadily, and the market size increased from 1.889 billion yuan in 2010 to 3.66 billion yuan in 2020, with an average annual growth rate of 6.84%. Due to the rapid growth in demand for OEM industry segments such as electronic manufacturing equipment, lithium battery equipment, photovoltaic equipment, semiconductor equipment, and packaging machinery, the size of the small PLC market has increased significantly in recent years, from 2.733 billion yuan in 2010 to 6.07 billion yuan in 2020, with an average annual growth rate of 8.31%.

With the vertical integration of the industrial Internet to the industrial chain, PLC is widely used in automotive manufacturing, electrical and electronic industries, the domestic PLC market with the continuous advancement of intelligent manufacturing, the PLC market will maintain stable growth in the next few years, and it is expected that the PLC market size will reach 14.460 billion yuan in 2022. The PLC market size is analyzed by brand, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 Change trend of PLC manufacturers’ market size from 2016 to 2020

Siemens market size and growth rate are far more than other brands, to maintain the first place for a long time, the Japanese Omron, Mitsubishi and American Rockwell for a long time to maintain the ranking 2~4, the top four ranking is relatively stable. With the increase in the size of the small PLC market, the market rankings of Delta and Principal have shown an upward trend, and Delta’s market ranking has entered the top five in 2020.

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Figure 4 Market share of domestic PLC in 2020

In 2020, China’s PLC market size is 12.43 billion yuan, and the market share structure of each brand PLC is shown in Figure 4 (a). Siemens ranks first with a market size of 5.31 billion yuan and a market share of 43%, and other manufacturers are Omron, Mitsubishi, Rockwell, Delta, Schneider Electric and other enterprises, and the above manufacturers occupy about 90% of the market share. Domestic enterprises only Xinjie, Huichuan and Hollysys entered the top 10.

In 2020, the market size of large PLC will reach 1.120 billion yuan, accounting for 10%; Medium PLC market size of 3.66 billion yuan, accounting for 34%, small PLC market size of 6.07 billion yuan, accounting for 56%, as shown in Figure 4 (b). Among them, the large PLC manufacturers are mainly European and American manufacturers, Rockwell, Siemens and Schneider ranked the top three in the large PLC market, accounting for 76.8% of the large PLC market market, as shown in Table 1.

E1100 Table 1 Market size of each brand PLC in 2020 (100 million yuan)

In the medium-sized PLC market pattern, Siemens is far ahead with a market share of 49.2%. Omron and Mitsubishi have a market size of more than 200 million yuan, forming the second tier, accounting for 29.2% of the market share. Rockwell and Schneider make up the third tier, accounting for 10% of the market. Small PLC technical barriers are low, the number of suppliers is large, but the top five manufacturers still occupy 74.3% of the market share, showing a big (Siemens) four small (Omron, Mitsubishi, Delta, Wuxi Xinjie) competitive pattern. In general, domestic PLC manufacturers have a certain competitiveness in the field of small PLC, and entered the medium and large PLC market.