Factory Automation And Industrial Controls Market Size & Share Analysis - Growth Trends And Forecast (2025 - 2030)

Global Factory Automation And Industrial Controls Market Trends and Insights

Industry 4.0 Adoption Acceleration

Roughly 80% of global producers intend to embed Industry 4.0 solutions by 2025, yet only 10% have achieved end-to-end digitization. National programs, such as the UK’s Made Smarter grants and China’s network of 33 Manufacturing Innovation Centers, offer capital and technical guidance, pushing the factory automation and industrial controls market toward advanced analytics and autonomous optimisation. Singapore’s Smart Industry Readiness Index also helps mid-sized firms benchmark their progress, ensuring that automated mobile robots and cloud scheduling tools deliver measurable cost savings. The convergence of AI, IoT sensors, and big-data engines yields real-time insights that reduce scrap, optimize energy loads, and shorten maintenance interventions. Vendors differentiate by wrapping cybersecurity and remote-support layers around these data flows, turning routine controller sales into multi-year service annuities.

Energy-Efficiency Mandates and Cost Pressure

Governments invested more than USD 1 trillion in efficiency programs and now expect industry to shoulder a sizeable share of the global CO₂-reduction target. Factories respond by installing variable-speed drives, smart compressors, and AI-enabled scheduling platforms that shift production to off-peak renewable availability. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe promotes industrial energy-efficiency best practices, underscoring the link between digital controls and decarbonisation. In the factory automation and industrial controls market, vendors now pre-package carbon dashboards with programmable logic controllers, turning compliance into a value-added service. As utilities raise time-of-use tariffs, fast-payback projects such as intelligent lighting and heat-recovery systems climb the corporate capital list.

Rising Labor Shortages in Manufacturing

Retirements and declining participation leave the global shop-floor workforce short by more than 2 million positions through 2030. Enterprises escalate automation rollouts, noting that 54% of investment plans target repetitive tasks, while 75% of executives highlight a growing need for data-centric roles to manage new technologies . In Japan, demographic headwinds spur autonomous vehicles and AI-guided construction equipment that later migrate to global manufacturing lines . Cost-benefit analyses show 20-30% labor-cost savings when robotics team with human operators, encouraging small plants to deploy collaborative arms and automated guided vehicles.

Low-Code / No-Code Automation Platforms

Low-code toolkits enable process engineers to configure dashboards and exception-handling logic without requiring deep coding skills, thereby compressing deployment lead times and easing maintenance backlogs. Modern MES suites embed graphical workflow builders that sit on secure, standards-based data layers, limiting the risk of ungoverned shadow applications. Citizen-developer programs multiply subtle optimisation projects, ranging from automated changeover sequences to customised quality alerts, expanding the addressable base of the factory automation and industrial controls market.

High Upfront CAPEX of Automation Projects

Comprehensive automation programs often exceed traditional budgeting cycles, especially for small and mid-sized enterprises. Sector M&A multiples reached 18 times EBITDA in 2024, raising vendor pricing expectations and extending break-even horizons. Universal baseline import tariffs of 10%, plus a 50% duty on Chinese semiconductors, elevate component costs and complicate ROI math for capital programmes. While public grants under the CHIPS Act defray some expenses, managers still contend with training outlays and integration risks that may disrupt production during cut-overs.

Cyber-Security Vulnerabilities in OT Networks

Ransomware volumes rose 46% year-on-year, with industrial control systems a favourite entry point.^[3] Critical infrastructure is now subjected to 13 attacks per second, a statistic that compels plant operators to reassess their network topologies and segmentation policies. CISA urges the disconnection of non-essential OT assets from public networks, credential hardening, and strict patching schedules. Guidance notwithstanding, legacy equipment and vendor heterogeneity slow remediation efforts, making managed-security-as-a-service a high-growth pocket within the factory automation and industrial controls market.

Segment Analysis

By Product: Control Systems Lead, Field Devices Accelerate

Industrial control systems secured 58% of the factory automation and industrial controls market in 2024, underscoring their role as the operational backbone for continuous and discrete manufacturing. Distributed control systems, SCADA, and modern PLCs integrate AI-powered diagnostics that pre-empt downtime events and synchronise with enterprise resource planning for just-in-time sequencing. Demand intensifies in semiconductor fabrication and battery cell assembly, areas that rely on microsecond-level loop execution to achieve defect-free throughput. At the same time, the factory automation and industrial controls market size attributed to field devices is projected to expand at a 9.8% CAGR to 2030, driven by advances in smart cameras and collaborative robotics that incorporate self-learning algorithms near the production line.

Machine-vision platforms move beyond simple presence checks toward 3D measurement of complex contours, enabling in-line correction rather than post-process rework. Industrial robots, once fenced, now share workspace with humans, guided by safe-motion firmware and proximity sensors. These capabilities lower integration barriers and open fresh opportunities in industries with shorter product cycles. Sensor manufacturers push higher-resolution, lower-power designs that feed real-time vibration, acoustic, and thermal signatures back to the control layer, reinforcing predictive-maintenance models that stretch asset life and limit unplanned outages.

Note: Segment shares of all individual segments available upon report purchase

By Component: Hardware Dominance, Services Surge

Hardware generated 62.5% of the factory automation and industrial controls market size in 2024 as companies refreshed aging controllers and servo drives to handle faster cycle times and tighter tolerances. Nevertheless, service revenues are climbing 11.2% per year, reflecting management’s preference for outcome-based contracts that de-risk technology adoption. Multi-year agreements often bundle installation, integration, and analytics support into usage-based pricing frameworks that align vendor incentives with plant performance.

Predictive-maintenance subscriptions aggregate vibration and temperature trends, benchmarking equipment fleets against anonymised peer datasets to spotlight outliers well before catastrophic failure. System-integration houses monetise protocol converters and edge gateways that join legacy Modbus devices to cloud dashboards running on secure OPC UA links. As the installed base of intelligent sensors swells, training and change-management engagements rise in parallel, completing the shift from one-time capital transactions to annuity-style service flows within the factory automation and industrial controls market.

By End-User Industry: Automotive Leads, Pharmaceutical Accelerates

Automotive lines represented 27% of factory automation and industrial controls market share in 2024, anchored by the electrification cycle that demands high-precision laser welding, battery cell stacking, and automated end-of-line testing. Flexible manufacturing cells accommodate frequent model launches and retrieval of historical energy-consumption data needed for scope-3 emissions reporting. Pharmaceutical operations, meanwhile, register the fastest growth at 10.3% CAGR through 2030 as regulators push for real-time release testing and smaller batch runs tailored to personalised therapies. Projects such as Merck’s USD 300 million FLEx Center showcase modular pods controlled by cloud-based MES that shorten validation timelines and support rapid molecule changeovers.

Food and beverage producers tighten traceability from raw-material intake to palletising, deploying vision-guided robotics and automated labelling to satisfy shelf-life accuracy rules. Chemical complexes automate compressor islands and safety-instrumented systems to comply with emissions caps, while electronics manufacturers rely on sub-micron motion control for wafer etching and camera optical-alignment stations.

Note: Segment shares of all individual segments available upon report purchase

By Control System Architecture: Proprietary Systems Dominate, Open Standards Gain

Proprietary architectures still account for 71% of installations as of 2024 because single-vendor stacks deliver end-to-end performance guarantees and simplified support. Yet open architectures are expanding at 13% CAGR, encouraged by vendor-neutral OPC UA and Time-Sensitive Networking profiles that promise deterministic, cyber-secure traffic over standard Ethernet. Hybrid deployments permit brownfield sites to bolt interoperable gateways onto existing assets, giving managers a phased path toward full openness. Market interest in open solutions rises when multi-site enterprises negotiate groupwide service contracts and seek to avoid price escalation tied to vendor lock-in.

Standardisation bodies across Europe advocate semantic models and unified ontologies so that machines can publish contextualised data without bespoke middleware. The long-term prize is a resilient supply network where software updates propagate seamlessly and cyber patches apply across diverse equipment, lowering total cost of ownership for the factory automation and industrial controls market.

Geography Analysis

Asia captured 39.4% of 2024 revenue thanks to dense manufacturing ecosystems, skilled labour pools, and assertive digital-policy frameworks. China's 2025-era initiatives finance demonstration lines that combine AI scheduling with 5G-enabled motion control, while Japanese conglomerates deploy autonomous haulage and precision welding robots to offset chronic labour gaps.^{[2] Mitsui & Co. Global Strategic Studies Institute, “Targeting a Paradigm Shift Through New Technologies,” mitsui.com} South Korea's chip fabrication complexes and India's smart-meter roll-outs further extend hardware demand, reinforcing Asia's central role in the factory automation and industrial controls market.

North American manufacturers accelerate investments as supply-chain sovereignty climbs the federal agenda. The CHIPS Act's USD 53 billion allotment stimulates local sensor and controller production, creating knock-on demand for secure edge-computing appliances. Universal tariffs introduced in April 2025 reinforce near-shoring, encouraging automation in small and mid-tier plants that previously relied on offshore component sourcing.

Europe focuses on sustainability and cyber-resilience. The EUR 150 billion allocation for digital transition under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (USD 163 billion) aims to modernise industrial bases, but execution gaps are leading many firms to rely on private-sector integrators to meet reporting deadlines. Compliance pressures with energy codes and supply-chain traceability hold particular sway in food, chemicals, and consumer goods plants.

South America, though starting from a smaller installed base, is projected to expand at a 10.1% CAGR through 2030. Brazil's "New Industry Brazil" program earmarks R$ 300 billion (USD 61 billion) for R&D incentives, equipment credits, and tax benefits, making automation upgrades financially attractive. Argentina's digital-factory roadmap encourages IoT pilots in agricultural machinery and food processing despite skills shortages. As cross-border technology transfer grows, regional system integrators partner with global OEMs to deliver turnkey lines suited to smaller batch volumes and variable-quality power supplies common in the region.

The Middle East and Africa join the factory automation and industrial controls market as policy makers diversify away from resource-heavy sectors. Green-field industrial zones embed predictive-maintenance platforms from inception, allowing them to leapfrog legacy architectures and focus on data-driven operations keyed to export-market compliance.