As new oil refineries and pipelines are built in North America, there will be an increased demand for new UPS (uninterrupted power supply) for these facilities, and this will help to grow the UPS market.
The UPS market ended 2006 with revenues of $214.1 billion and is forecasted to be at $327.6 billion by 2013, as reported in new analysis from Frost & Sullivan on the North American Industrial UPS Market.
According to Frost & Sullivan's Research Analyst Karthi Hanumantharau, the combination of growth in end-user markets, such as oil and gas, the power industry and process control, with increased industrial automation will probably fuel the growth of the UPS market, along with the use of IT systems in manufacturing plants which is expected to create new demand for UPS in these systems.
In a quest to increase productivity levels, more manufacturing plants are using automation coupled with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), manufacturing execution systems (MES), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Protecting these systems becomes even more vital, and as power levels increase, the demand for UPS will likely grow, the analysis shows.
Technology is surfacing as one of the stumbling blocks to growth in the UPS market. Because the technology of the UPS unit is saturated, any advancement in UPS technology is not great enough to encourage end users to spend more money, the report notes. Also, the use of batteries in UPS units has become an environmental concern for users.
"As more and more manufacturing units are being shifted to east Europe and Asia Pacific regions, the demand for UPS units in North America is likely to go down," explains Hanumantharau. "In addition, the fierce competition results in lowering the price of the UPS units, which leads to lower profit margins for the UPS vendors."
