Industry 4.0 – the wave of IoT has swept through our homes and now the entire manufacturing sector. Plastic injection moulding, an industrial process worth nearly $300bn alone and spanning across industries from automotive to medical devices to electronic components, is being automated, digitised and factories are transitioning to cloud-based production management systems. With many industry players offering digital solutions, services, and cloud-based platforms, standards are still being set and the factory of the future is norming and forming.
An opportunistic investment, a commercial joint venture deal on the table that offered the potential to jump start an IoT service-based line of business to improve the management and maintenance of expensive injection moulds. With the average customer holding £25-30m in mould assets, the opportunity seemed clear, but the Kistler team had no confidence in whether to go for it or not. Venturebright were asked to provide market insight and guidance on the feasibility and attractiveness of the opportunity for Kistler.
The Kistler team abandoned the joint venture and is setting up a new division to tackle service-led and analytics-based lines of business, with the ambition that a quarter of future revenues will come from this new business unit by 2025.
