Exhibitors are enthused to feel the swarm of interested visitors to this year’s Australian Manufacturing Week
Whatever we did is working. I cannot fault the stallholders’ passion and enthusiasm at AMW2025. Everyone wants to be here because they know what they will gather in the end—connections, sales, and renewed, happy business relationships.
Also, walking along through the crowds, I find a couple of visitors staring intensely at a screen displaying work being done by an OKUMA robotic machine. They know what they’re looking at. They understand the detail and that’s the difference in crowds between this year and the last time AMW was in Melbourne in 2023. The crowd has a more professional flavour. A few measures were put in place this year for registrations, and I think it focused the visitors. Perhaps the fact that the Federal Election was so last weekend (feels like a month ago, right?), so people are now thinking longer term. They know they can plan out til the end of next year and beyond.
All day yesterday, today and Thursday, the ever-popular Future Solutions Speaker program continues to roll out intense presentations in the big orange room in the middle of the floor. Check the program HERE.
Rolling through the aisles, I stopped to speak with David Wilton, MD of Lorch Welding. He has brought OTC Asia and Daihen into the country from Germany. The Lorch range of welders is only now available here in Australia and David is excited about the Lorch iQS, the fully digital connected system with a broad portfolio of advanced processes. He also set aside a MicorMIG Mobile, which can be positioned to weld just about anywhere with the same quality and output as the MicorMIG kits.
Jenny Castles from Koenig Machinery reminds me her company is primarily into laser cutting, but the technology has changed in that the higher-powered options are much more affordable than they used to be. “So, we’re finding customers are ready to move to higher-powered machines that can cut much thicker materials,” she said.
“AMW gives us an excellent opportunity to meet our customers and new ones, explain to them how we offer service all across Australia, and introduce them to our technicians who are all here on the days of the show. We don’t have salespeople here; we’re all technicians and they can all support the service. We’ve also had the opportunity to show some new equipment, so we’ve got a 61 machine here, which is actually a fibre welder combined with a CO2 laser and CNC metal cutting, and it’s a very affordable entry-level machine. We’ve also introduced a range of finishing machines to line up with your laser, allowing you to have a full machinery range for a nice final product.”
Down in the Additive Manufacturing Zone, Ben Matthews from Titomic is talking up the many projects the company is into at the moment. Most of which he can’t talk about of course. “AMW is a great opportunity to show off our technology and to meet industry members who we know will understand the technology,” he said. “Some of the composites we use in our applications are pretty complex but the customers we’ve seen are clued up already, or willing to learn, which is great.”
For FANUC, it is all about robotics, automation, and combining robots with machine tools. Gaby Ghabach, is Managing Director of Fanuc Oceania. “Artificial Intelligence is a big part of our development in Japan at the moment,” adds Gaby, who’s been coming and exhibiting at AMW for many years. “All our product development with the future is all based around AI. So, AI is very important machine learning as well as smart factories.”
“AMW is an opportunity to promote Fanuc, a giant name in the robotics industry,” he said. “We are 100% made in Japan, and the company has been active in the country since 1976 for sales and service.” Gaby feels manufacturing in Australia is a little bit unrecognised. “I think the show here puts us on the map and hopefully governments can take us more seriously about what we do here with robotics in Australia.”
“At AMW we get the exposure, we get the branding out there and we let people know that we’re change our business model in a way that we can now be a direct OEM to suppliers in the country.”
The second-day impression of the AMW show here in the MCEC is that it is clean and tidy. Well measured out, the Zones are filled with the best examples of manufacturing technology, far and away the most up-to-date displays of precision, market-ready hardware, and the friendliest upvibe bunch of operators. I’m impressed.
If you are thinking of coming on Thursday or Friday, I urge you to register online at the link below, and please bring a photo ID to get in.
These last two days will be quite large, and you won’t want to miss out.