According to experts, the CAD market is growing stronger than ever in 2021, thanks to digitalization that affects every aspect of design and engineering in every discipline. The advent of CAD, along with standardized networking protocols, marked the birth of digital technologies for design and engineering in the 1980s. Forty years later, these technologies have become part of digitalization and helped create digital twins.
Experts say that the use of CAD enables comprehensive optimization of the organization of production at all stages, from procurement of materials and components, to the management of the production of spare parts for sold products. It is important that many CAD systems allow to receive not just design documentation, but files ready for uploading to the machines – machining centers with numerical control. This makes it possible to efficiently organize distributed production, minimizing the risks of quality degradation of finished products. Large companies can focus on key production processes, providing themselves with the necessary auxiliary products, parts and spare parts by forming an ecosystem of small and medium manufacturing companies.
Analysts call the transition to cloud technologies, when the customer acquires access to the system for a certain period of time, a promising trend in CAD development.
Analysts predict that CAD sales will grow by $2.53 billion in 2024 compared to 2020, with an average annual growth rate of 5%. Experts say that solutions for the manufacturing sector are the most important in the market in question. In this case, the negative impact on the market has a growing number of products with open source and free versions of CAD.The study notes that the CAD market remains fragmented with a large number of players, each with a small share of revenue. Among the biggest CAD producers the analysts named the companies which successfully applied SaaS marketing strategy (listed in alphabetical order): Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Dassault Systemes, Fujifilm Holdings, General Electric, Hexagon, IMSI Design, PTC, Siemens and Trimble.