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Welding Industry

Low investments in the capital goods sector and fallout of economic slowdown since 1998-99 resulted in stagnation of the welding equipment and consumables market. But, the government's increasing thrust on infrastructure development coupled with massive investments in the industrial sector is leading to an upturn in the fortunes of the welding industry.
The demand for welding products is derived primarily from the steel-using industry. The growth of the welding industry is therefore largely dependent on, and runs parallel to, the growth of the manufacturing and capital goods sector. The industrial sector and the capital goods sector are showing strong signs of recovery, as reflected by the growth in GDP for the manufacturing sector of around 9 per cent in the current year against 7 per cent last year. The capital goods sector grew even faster at 13.5 per cent during the current year against 9.7 per cent last year. "Growth is expected to continue in times to come," says R.K. Bhardwaj, Technical Director, Welding Specialities (I) Pvt. Ltd.
The welding industry consists of three groups of products, welding consumables, welding equipment and welding automation products and systems, with a market share of 75 per cent, 20 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. The total market size of the industry is approximately Rs 1.5 billion divided equally among organised and un organised players. However, the introduction of VAT from April 1, 2005, is expected to benefit the organised sector.
The domestic welding industry is skewed in favor of the manual metal arc welding (MMAW) process, which accounts for 80 per cent of the total market, followed by semi-automatic at 15 per cent and automatic at 5 per cent. The primary reason for the dominance of manual methods is that the equipment viz. electric arc welding equipment and consumables needed for this type of welding are not very technology intensive.
"The automatic and semi-automatic welding processes significantly improve the quality and productivity of the weld apart from it being a safer and less polluting method," says Bhardwaj. The equipment used for automatic welding is MIG, TIG and CNC machine tools while consumables used are continuous wire electrodes.
Automatic welding techniques are more capital intensive and hence they find application mainly in mass production centres involving repetitive welding where economy of scale justifies their use. Hence, it is widely used in the automobile and white goods manufacturing industry. With increasing competitiveness among user industries and the need to improve efficiency and quality, a gradual shift from the use of manual to semi- automatic processes is taking place.

Because the welding industry changes so slowly, advances are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This has been true since the 1920s. And although welding technologies already reach across 140 different processes and process variants -- from metals, polymers, and ceramics to composite materials, from PC chips to trans-Atlantic ships -- new uses for joining continually are emerging, sometimes in unexpected places."Welding may be the next major trend in surgery," writes author Kate Matheson. "Research being funded by the U.S. Army may see wounded soldiers being welded back together with a portable laser and tissue patches." She reports that a material derived from animal tissue "can be welded directly to arteries and veins or even into the intestines or bladder."