• A total of 6,505 visitors and 378 exhibitors took part in Stuttgart.
• “High-quality meetings characterized the trade fair.”
• Two fully booked exhibition halls and two high-calibre lecture forums.

Visitor and exhibitor numbers on the rise again

VISION 2022 recorded a total number of 6,505 trade visitors. This made the world's leading trade fair again the centre of the machine vision industry.

“VISION 2022 was a complete success and vastly exceeded our expectations – both in terms of visitors and exhibitors. It was also nice to see that, following the limitations caused by the pandemic last year, the event once again had a high international presence. This means that VISION once more developed along established structures also in terms of information procurement,” said Roland Bleinroth, President of Messe Stuttgart.

Overall, visitors from 60 countries were registered. The strongest presence was from Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Austria, Belgium, Poland, Spain and the UK, VISION was also able to welcome a larger trade audience from South Korea, Japan and the USA.

In addition to the classical client industries such as electrical engineering/electronics, mechanical engineering and plant construction as well as the automotive and automotive component supply industry, there was a significant share of visitors from non-industrial sectors present, including medical technology and pharmacology, agricultural industry, aerospace engineering as well as transport and logistics. Accordingly, the interest in offers of non-industrial applications increased compared to the previous year. Similarly, turnkey machine vision systems also recorded increased visitor attention.

The quality of visitors remained as high as ever: 55 per cent of visitors indicated that they were decisive or involved in purchasing and procurement decisions in their companies. 27 per cent attended the fair with deliberate investment or purchase intentions.

The demand for machine vision components and systems grew in 2021 more than expected. The business volume of the German machine vision industry increased by 16 per cent in Germany to EUR 3.1 billion. The European machine vision industry also recorded a growth of 17 per cent.

The promotional supporter of VISION, VDMA Machine Vision, confirmed the positive basic attitude of the sector at the inauguration of the fair: “Despite the general economic insecurity, the sector’s continued growth prospects are promising. The specialised machine vision department of the VDMA is expecting a growth of 8 per cent for the German and European machine vision industry in 2022,” said Mark Williamson, chairman of the board of management of VDMA Machine Vision.

“The machine vision industry continues to penetrate new application areas, increasingly also in the non-industrial sector.” The positive developments of the machine vision industry are also reflected in the number of exhibiting companies at VISION.

A total of 378 exhibiting companies – 60 per cent of which came from abroad – presented the wide range of machine vision solutions across three days. Next to many first-time participants, the sector’s key players were also present at the fair.

To Dr Dietmar Ley, CEO Basler AG, VISION is Europe’s most important Computer Vision market place: “For us, VISION is the central platform for introducing innovations and communicating our new orientation towards becoming a solution provider.”

Ley added, “Once again, many visitors approached us with specific new projects this year. Initiatives such as the VISION Guided Tours for food & beverages, intra-logistics and medical & pharmacology created new incentives for visitors from application areas beyond factory automation.”

In terms of technology, Basler experienced at VISION 2022 a continuation of the trending topics of the past few years. “We have observed progress in the area of artificial intelligence. Within this context, Industry 4.0 with a Cloud architecture and AI-based machine vision will be increasingly established on edge devices. At the same time, 3D technology will continue to mature and become less expensive.”

Jan Hartmann, Managing Director of JDS, also emphasized the importance of VISION as the World's leading trade fair for the sector.  “Machine vision is a central component of automation technology, especially in combination with 3D vision and artificial intelligence. At VISION, the visitors discovered how we facilitate the access to these key technologies, offering easy to handle components to initiate and optimise automation processes.”

Beckhoff Automation participated for the first time as an exhibitor at the fair. Bernd Stöber, Senior product manager vision, expressed his all-round satisfaction: “It was our aim to present the vision-tech sector for the first time in addition to our previous vision software solutions also with the new hardware products and thus an integrated, control-synchronised all-inclusive package. What event would be better suited for this than VISION.

“Our extended portfolio allowed us to generate a large number of new contacts, After the in-depth talks at VISION, the visitors now perceive Beckhoff as a single source provider for vision solutions. This confirms our intention to exhibit again in 2024.”

VISION Award 2022 goes to Kitov.ai

Kitov.ai also participated for the first time. As a newcomer to the fair, the Israeli company directly won the VISION Award 2022 for its CAD2SCAN software that significantly simplifies the structure of robotic inspection systems through the use of CAD-based automated inspection planning.

“Winning the VISION Award 2022 allows us to continue the development of this technology and to optimise the KI. This makes it easier for manufacturers to introduce automated visual inspection. We are incredibly grateful for having been given this opportunity to address a wider trade audience. There is no greater appreciation for our work. I can only recommend any company to submit their machine vision and AI innovations to the VISION Award,” said Corey Merchant, Vice President Americas at Kitov.ai.

VISION Startup World on track for growth

One indication of the sector’s innovative power is also the VISION Start-up World at which a total of 20 young companies were able to present themselves. Within the scope of the daily start-up pitch sessions, a Start-Up of the Day was chosen on each day, and on the last day of the fair, Visometry from Farmstead, Germany, emerged as the VISION Start-up 2022.

The company convinced the jury with its “Digital Twin” approach for the detection and tracing of components based on their 3D CAD files. This allows quality engineers to carry out a target/actual analysis to detect production errors at an early stage of the assembly process.

For anyone who was not able to attend the fair in person, VISION offered a live stream and videos on demand of the entire lecture programme of the Industrial VISION Days. The viewers of the live stream came from 18 countries. This once again highlighted the international significance of VISION.

Standards as the basis for growth

Internationally uniform standards are considered to be the basis for the acceptance of machine vision technology among the most diverse client industries. This is also emphasized by the European Machine Vision Association EMVA.

“As the leading European sector association, we have once again sponsored the ’International Vision Standards’ stand to introduce the trade visitors of VISION to the standards that are required for the continued growth of the machine vision sector. VISION remains the world’s most significant trade fair for machine vision,” summarised Dr. Chris Yates.

“The many new companies and technologies present at the fair vividly confirmed this and supported the performance capacity and great vivacity of the sector. We are currently entering a new macro-economic environment and are confident that machine vision is excellently set up to continue to provide long-term added value for our users,” Dr Yates said.

Dr Dietmar Ley, CEO Basler AG, shares this belief: “Currently the sector is subjected to powerful market dynamics. Past experience shows that decreased demand usually did not exceed 18 months. We are expecting the market to recover in 2024 and the situation of the material markets of electronic components to improve within the course of 2023.”

The next VISION will take place from 8 to 10 October 2024.