In his role as AMTIL Member Liaison, Alan Taylor regularly speaks to our members to gauge how their business is doing and assess the overall state of the industry. Here he discusses the findings of our 2018-19 Members Survey.
Our latest campaign had a similar contact threshold as last year, but also saw an unprecedented influx of paid members over the period of the census. At the start of the census AMTIL had a membership of 221, which rose to 282 by the end – a 27.6% increase. Of those 282 members, the total membership comprised 140 manufacturing technology suppliers (MTSs), 120 manufacturing technology users (MTUs), and 22 Industry Supporters (ISs).
The rise in membership appeared to have an impact on the number of call backs. A total of 531 calls were made, but only 34.4% of these resulted in contact being made, significantly down on the 46% of last census. By the end of the census, 183 members had been successfully contacted – a disappointing figure at 65% of the membership. Nonetheless, the number of contacts was similar enough to the last census for comparisons to be made.
The total turnover of the AMTIL members contacted was approximately $5.5457bn. The membership employed 12,186 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees. However, 12 members (7%) said they were unable to get the employees they need; down from 14% of members who were unable to fill positions last year. This is largely because businesses have changed their model to adapt to the number of workers they can get, rather than recruiting the numbers needed.
Of AMTIL’s 140 MTS members, just 73 members provided information for our survey. These 73 members had a combined annual revenue of $3.35bn and employed 7,808 FTE employees. In the MTU category, 70 were contacted. Their annual turnover was just over $1bn, and they had 3,262 FTE employees.
Probably the most important data collected each year is the MTU data that has been amortised – this excludes manufacturing companies with a revenue below $1m or above $200m. In this set, manufacturers declared combined revenues of just over $800m with 2,992 FTE employees. This is compared to $684m and 2179 FTE employees last year. Therefore, an “average” AMTIL member in manufacturing would have revenue of about $12m with 44 FTE employees. This is marginally more than the $11m and 35 employees of last year’s census. The annual revenue per employee this year is $267,789.
The amortised data also includes the tiers covered by the 67 contacted members as follows:
| Tier 1 | Tier 2 | Tier 3 | Tier 4 or lower |
| 28 | 30 | 17 | 5 |
Curiously 21% (14 in total) of those asked didn’t know what tiers they supplied.
Many of those in the amortised list had their own in-house design capability – 77.7% (49 in total) stated they are able to design in-house. When it came to intellectual property (IP), however, only about 24.7% of the total revenue was generated by manufacturing members’ own IP. That means that approximately $20.6m was generated by IP held by the manufacturing members contacted. This is an average of $3.2m per member.
In terms of exports, a mere 7.7% of the revenue was generated by exports. That equates to $61.7m from the manufacturing members, and an average of $979,365 per member.
When looking at additional information extracted from notes, there was not much in the way of consistent comments that point to anything of note. That had partly to do with the increase in new member calls, as the direction of the conversation tended to be different. It’s also a relationship that hasn’t been established, so the new member tends to “sell” their business rather than talk about it the way older members do – new members don’t tend to speak about problems in their business.