As our customers’ engineering partner, we leverage our expertise to create smarter, safer and more sustainable factories, production lines and operations. By embracing innovation in automation, our high-performance valves and actuators optimise processes for greater productivity, supporting a wide range of industries in becoming more efficient and sustainable.
Market trends and our response
Global economic instability and geopolitical tensions have led to uncertainty in investment levels during 2024 despite strong long-term trends underpinning demand. Labour scarcity, improving technology to automate complex tasks, and using sensors in factories to enhance energy efficiency all underpin the positive long-term trend for greater automation.
Our new business structure has created a strong platform for growth by enabling greater market focus. This has led to improved customer engagement and satisfaction, whilst enabling faster sharing of best practice across the Group. Our Growth Hub initiatives to solve customer challenges are progressing well, with a number of exciting projects across the sector advanced during 2024, including an electric actuation solution to supply ergonomic bike lifts for a leading sporting goods chain, and supporting compressed natural gas vehicle OEMs to improve efficiency. We are seeing growth in this market, particularly in developing economies such as India.
We have also reduced operational complexity to optimise efficiency and productivity, and are supporting our customers’ own manufacturing efficiency goals by developing connected products. Our customers are increasingly seeking smart products that simplify factory management and operations, including identifying preventative maintenance opportunities or increasing pneumatic circuit efficiency to manage air flow.
Revenue
IMI growth target
Creating value in Industrial Automation
Ever since the birth of the assembly line at the beginning of the 20th century, automation has gone hand-in-hand with commercial success, to the point that the businesses that didn’t automate soon struggled. We’ve worked in partnership with customers for many years, optimising their automated processes so they stay competitive.
Bringing energy savings to a robotics-assisted hydroponics farm
We’re co-innovating with our customers and leveraging digital technology to create the smart, safe, sustainable factories, production lines and warehouse operations of the future.
2024 highlights
– Improvement in Net Promoter Score (‘NPS’) to 66 points, achieved through customer engagement to identify product requirements, developing integrated solutions to address customer challenges. Investing in a new customer relationship management system and digital tools to identify cross-selling opportunities and streamline the online customer purchasing process
– Complexity reduction through two major factory consolidations in the US and Europe, leading to supply chain efficiencies, better customer response and shorter lead times. We are strengthening our competitive advantage through our ability to deliver critical customer products within 24 hours
– Launch of regional Growth Hub sprint teams to drive regional expansion of customer projects: once validated by multiple customers we will expand these globally
– New contract wins through our growing presence in our Rail vertical, including a £2m contract to supply our unique absorbent dryer solutions to a rail customer
– Further traction of our new automation product, Transforming Tooling – which uses grippers to move sheets of metal along automotive factory production lines – with a significant order secured in 2024
Priorities for 2025 and beyond
Three main priorities will drive our strategy over the next five years. First, our continued focus on our customers. By focusing on our top 5,000 customers, which represent c.95% of our business, we will continue to enhance their satisfaction. We will refine our go-to-market and Aftermarket strategy, and continue to ensure we respond actively to customer feedback to improve our service and accelerate growth.
Second, we will continue to develop sectorspecific verticals in 2025 to expand our market presence, both organically and through targeted acquisitions. Our focus into rail and electric motion is delivering solid growth year-on-year. We will continue to capture new opportunities in sectors with growing demand for automation solutions, such as the rapidly growing electric vehicles market in China. We are engaged with a number of OEMs in their initial product specification development and expect good order growth in the coming years as models are launched.
Third, we will continue to utilise Growth Hub, our internal innovation engine, to identify and develop innovative products and digital solutions that address specific customer needs within Industrial Automation. As part of this, we continue to invest significantly in building our commercial team capabilities. Our sales teams across all regions are trained in key account management to accelerate business growth.