European machine tool manufacturers industry orders grow steadily

The second quarter of 2011 was impressive for European machine tool manufacturers. According to a report by the German Machine Tool Builders Association (VDW), German machine tool orders in the second quarter increased by 83% year-on-year, and overall demand in the first half of the year doubled compared to the same period in 2010. From the end of 2008 to the beginning of 2010, the world's machine tool industry demand has experienced a process of significant decline. However, since the middle of 2010, orders in the machine tool industry began to rise month by month, and the industry situation improved. Gerhard Hein, head of the economics and statistics department at VDW, said: 'The continuous rise in demand has indeed led to an excellent first half of the industry.' He pointed out that the industry growth in 2011 was based on the improvement and progress in 2010. According to VDW statistics, in the second quarter, new machine tool orders in Germany increased by 72% year-on-year, while overseas export orders increased by 88% year-on-year. In the first half of 2011, domestic machine tool orders in Germany increased by 96% compared with the same period in 2010, and orders in overseas markets increased by 107% year-on-year. Orders in the first half of the year were even 8% higher than the historical record set in the same period in 2008. In Italy, according to the report of the Italian Machine Tool Manufacturers Association (UCIMU), thanks to the strong growth of overseas demand, Italian machine tool orders in the second quarter increased by 13% compared with the same period in 2010, and the order volume has been close to the level before the crisis. In the second quarter, the demand for machine tools from overseas increased by 44.5% year-on-year, but domestic orders in Italy fell by 33.8% year-on-year. In the first half of 2011, Italian machine tool orders increased by 16.3% year-on-year, mainly because overseas orders increased by 37.4% year-on-year, while its domestic orders still fell by 19.5%. Giancarlo Losma, chairman of UCIMU, said: 'The performance of the industry this quarter is really satisfactory, and the productivity level of our factories is now close to the level before the crisis.' VDW said that the continuous increase in new orders has brought the industry's capacity utilization to a high level , the industry's current capacity utilization rate of 97.4%, much higher than July 2010's 76.3%. At the same time, the industry's orders in hand were 9.7 months, which also reached a high level in recent years. Nonetheless, the machine tool industry remains cautious about expanding capacity, mainly due to the current economic uncertainty in Europe and the United States. Hein points out that the effects of the 2008/2009 financial crisis are deeply ingrained.