Financial analysts are tagging industrial automation as a good investment. They have some interesting reasons:
- The race to the bottom is over. With third-world countries running out of their cheapest labor supplies — rural workers with little training and low expectations — automation is becoming attractive to nations that haven’t considered it before.
- Increasingly strict safety regulations, including food safety requirements affecting packaging and processing, demand automation in areas that haven’t previously embraced it.
- Competition based on new technologies, from smart cars to 3-D printing, will require new and expanded kinds of automation in many emerging industries.
At the same time, experts don’t say many new entrants into the field. Investing in the current winners is the smart money move.