Global Retail Automation Market

Automated retail enables self-service among the customers; one can find this in the form of standalone kiosks in heavily crowded locations such as malls, airports, and resorts. Automated retailing involves the use of various tools which in turn can help reduce the retail associated labour costs in retailing.

These automated retailing machines let the consumers select products by using a touch screen interface and then, pay for purchases made, using a credit or debit card. The product is then dispensed, sometimes even via an internal robotic arm of a machine.

Few examples of automated stores from around the world are ZoomShops, BigStore by Magex, Redbox, and Spot Shops by Signifi.

Automation has been a playing a major role in the continuous growth of the retail sector. Walmart, Kroger, Tesco, and Metro are some of the biggest retail giants that are contributing significantly to the growth of the retail automation market. Hence, the retail companies have started investing large amounts in the automation products and services so as to cut down on costs and boost their efficiency at the same time. These solutions can not only enhance the efficiency of the retail store operations, but also enhance the customer experience. The retail automated products such as bar-code reader, currency counter, cash register, bill printer, kiosks are some of the self-servicing systems that are helping in improving the existing retailing process.

The retail automation market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.41% over the fore-casted period 2014-2020. The growing retail sector, increasing number of retails and benefits could be looked at as an opportunity by the potential investors, as one can clearly foresee a growing demand for the retail automation market.

The Asia Pacific region is home to more than half of the human beings in the world. The region has a steady economic growth. The GDP growth for the period 2014-2015 is fore-casted to be more than 5%, which indeed is result of the growing global economy, good labour markets and robust credit growth. China, India and Japan are in fact the leading exporters of consumer goods to the various parts of the world. China usually exports more than $2 trillion worth of goods around the world all the time. These exports vary from industrial goods to home care to stationary to other consumer related goods. The healthy export levels in this region can be a good opportunity for the retail automation sector as well.

A similar growth can also be noticed in the European region now. In the year 2012, the retail and the wholesale services represented about 11% of EU’s GDP. There are currently more than 6 million companies active in this sector. There have been changes in the retail market in Europe in the last few years. This because, more and more retail companies have opened up multiple product lines. The demand for consumer goods in the EU region varies from country to country. In countries like Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy, which are still battling the economic downturn have lesser demand for these products. The unemployment rate was more than 15% in 2014 and more than 25% in Spain, which reduced the spending capacity of the people in the region. But in countries like Russia, Poland and Turkey on the other hand, this demand is increasing. Turkey is one of the countries in the EU region, which is rapidly growing with the increasing GDP that was about 1.7% in the first quarter of 2014. In Turkey, the number of shopping centres, supermarkets and hypermarkets opening up is also increasing. For this huge retail market, the need or the demand for retail automation is bound to go up.

Some of the major vendors manufacturing retail automation solutions mentioned in the report are Siemens, Fujistu, Casio, Motorola, Honeywell, Toshiba, Seiko Epson, NCR Corporation, First Data Corporation and Wincor Nixdorf.