USMTO and CTMR, September 2022: The US Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) programme tracks orders in the US market, based on the reports from participants. In the first three-quarters of this year, total orders were worth $4.2 billion, +2.7% higher than in the same period in 2021 (January to September).
We don’t usually comment on the monthly data because it can be volatile but it is worth noting that, thanks in part to IMTS, orders in September 2022 were higher than in August; however, readers may recall that there was an exceptionally strong end to 2021 and, for the first time in the history of the survey, orders in a September in which IMTS occurred were lower than the year before. As a result, the 12-month rolling total for orders in the US market is continuing to fall from its peak although 2022 still looks on track to be the 3rd best year for the survey, so hardly a disaster!
For confidentiality reasons we don’t have all of the regional data, but trends are published for metal cutting machines which accounted for more than 98% of the machinery orders so far in 2022, so it is a good pointer to the overall trend. We continue to see the regions split into three groups; double-digit growth in the year-to-date figures is being recorded in the South-East (+21.2%) and South-Central (+19.2%) regions, while the North-Central-East (+5.6%) and Western (+4.4%) areas have a slower pace of growth – there were modest declines in the North-East (-5.8%) and North-Central-West (-7.7%) areas.
The US Cutting Tool Market Report (CTMR) tracks orders for tooling on a similar basis. In a reverse of the machine tool situation, September’s orders for cutting tools were lower than in August but higher than a year earlier. We don’t see the same impact from IMTS on the tooling demand but this is still slightly surprising as we would expect demand to pick-up after the holidays. The rolling 12-month total continues to be on an upward trend although the pace of that improvement is slowing.
You can download the press releases for the two surveys from the AMT web-site at https://www.amtonline.org/topic/intelligence, with the CTMR release also published on the USCTI web-site at www.uscti.com (go to the News Releases tab); alternatively, you can request either or both releases from MTA and we can make sure you get them when they are published each month.