Market Overview

The domestic PLM market size, based on the shipment values at system/solution manufacturers, declined by 6.2% from the previous year to 261,570 million yen in 2020.

The economic activities slowed down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, reducing capital investment in manufacturing industry globally, which downturned the PLM market in the world. For the PLM market in Japan, it recorded negative growth for the first time in 9 years since 2012 when it had been affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Although it enjoyed favorable growth just like the previous year until January to March in 2020, it has been sluggish since April when the environment turned for the worse.

Noteworthy Topics

Telework Changed Workstyle at Designing Sector

Affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, telework and web conference quickly spread in enterprises, which significantly changed the workstyle at designing sector.

In designing, the telework environment allowed sharing of 2D or 3D CAD-designed data over web conferences where consultations take place. However, reviewing of designs by sharing the images of web conference systems is assumed difficult, so that implementation of 3D-viewer-used reviewing systems for designs is expected.

Also, increase of telework has rapidly expanded cloud users. The Japanese manufacturing industry had tenacious resistance to cloud, but the COVID-19 calamity became the opportunity for it to take root in the industry, bringing about a great change. As major IT vendors seem to shift to provide SaaS solutions, it is likely for PLM to shift to SaaS, too.

Future Outlook

The domestic PLM market size in 2021, based on the shipment values at system/solution manufacturers, is likely to rise by 1.7% to achieve 266,000 million yen.

The PLM market has been strictly connected with the economic trend, especially with capital investment in the manufacturing industry. Now that overseas economies, China and the U.S., in particular, have already upturned, the global PLM market is anticipated to be driven by these countries. Although Japan keeps being extremely uncertain, with another state of emergency announced in some parts of the country, the domestic PLM market can fully be recovered if the capital investment at major companies becomes brisk again. The market size is forecasted to attain 302,000 million yen by 2024.

Research Outline