Industry 4.0 in Austria

PwC Austria and PwC's strategy consulting team Strategy& surveyed 100 Austrian industrial companies and their management boards on one of the key global developments.

One of the drivers of the fourth industrial revolution is the increasing networking of value chains within and across companies.

Around 20 percent of respondents expect significant productivity improvements in the next five years. Digitization of the value chain plays a key role here, with a quarter of companies having already achieved a high level of digitization.

In the next five years, 85 percent of companies would like to have implemented Industry 4.0 solutions in all key business areas. This means that the number of highly digitized companies is expected to triple in this decade.

Not only the value chain, but also the product and service portfolio will be expanded into networked and automated services. If 36 percent of companies currently have a product portfolio with a high degree of digitization, this proportion will grow to 80 percent in the next five years.

The expectation of increased sales also plays a relevant role in the use of Industrie 4.0 solutions. On average, the companies surveyed expect an annual increase in revenue of 2.6 percent through the digitization of their own products and services.

One fifth of the companies even expect a cumulative increase in sales of 20 percent by 2020. Extrapolated to the Austrian industrial landscape, this results in total additional sales of just under three billion euros per year.

Revenue increases are also expected in connection with disruptive digital business models. The focus of this development is on increasing customer value through an increasing range of value-added solutions.