Questions About Europe’s Industrial Future Were Raised at Davos 2025; Hannover Messe 2025 Should Look to Answer Those Involving Manufacturing

Davos 2025 covered a wide range of hot topics, including the value and challenges of AI, how to drive sustainability, and what the world expects of the United States for the next 4 years. A critical undercurrent occurred across many of these topics: what is Europe’s role in global industry and geopolitics going forward? With Hannover Messe around the corner and European manufacturing facing what seems to be a losing battle in competitive production, both local and global manufacturers and technology vendors need to begin presenting solid roadmaps outlining how the region’s manufacturing sector can adapt and compete. Europe needs to be laying out its manufacturing battleplans and actions, and Hannover Messe 2025 is an ideal stage.

Hannover Messe is Europe’s chance to show its mettle in the manufacturing area. Industrial technology heavyweights are present in force and the German government ministers come for their yearly tour. However, the show doesn’t exist to simply fluff Europe, manufacturers and technology leaders come from around the world to hear the announcements made about new solutions and technology development, discuss strategy with industry leaders, and identify best practices. With IMTS (International Manufacturing Technology Show) now only occurring every 2 years, the premium on Hannover Messe announcements and networking has increased in those off years, with 2025 being such an occasion. As it stands, the Hannover Messe 2025 conference program does show good alignment with the needs for improving the state and competitiveness of European manufacturing, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI), energy efficiency, and connectivity, so it will be critical for technology vendors to highlight their capabilities and development of technology in these spaces.

Consistently, European technology vendors have been looking to expand their footprints abroad, trying to take leading industry solutions most commonly to the U.S., Chinese, and Southeast Asian markets. Europe itself has been seen as a bastion of safety, where the adoption of these solutions will be driven simply by historic relationships between manufacturers and technology vendors. However, the goal to push industrial technology advancement to support the specific challenges and industries of European manufacturing has waned significantly in recent years and historically strong manufacturing verticals in Europe have struggled to remain competitive. Leading European technology vendors need to refocus solution design on European manufacturers and their issues, rather than creating technologies to meet the needs of Chinese and U.S. manufacturing challenges, which are inherently different, or else they risk losing this core traditional customer base.

There are two main steps that technology vendors at Hannover Messe should take to drive opportunities to improve European manufacturing:

1. Focus on Industry Challenges Specific to European Markets: Technology vendors need to target their solutions toward winning areas for European manufacturing. The region does not align well with low-cost manufacturing in a race to the bottom for production costs, and solutions should reflect a greater focus on improving product quality or empowering sustainable product design, rather than simply cutting costs (although this obviously should be kept as a considered factor). Solutions should enable automation and worker augmentation, addressing complex product manufacturing. Pushing solutions that aim to support manufacturers to simply manufacture Electric Vehicles (EVs) cheaper than Chinese and U.S. markets will not lead to success.
2. Address a Broader Range of Manufacturing Verticals: Many technology vendors at Hannover Messe focus their solutions heavily on traditional bastions of European manufacturing; automotive, chemical, and machinery & equipment. However, these are also industries that are struggling the most to compete with U.S. and Chinese markets. Vendors need to expand both their capabilities and narrative around solutions that meet the needs of less established manufacturing verticals, especially those that are not facing such stiff competition in Europe. An example of this would be the green manufacturing industry, particularly beyond just battery manufacturing.

With strong government and technology vendor support for the green manufacturing market, Europe could carve out a significant competitive advantage. With the region still struggling to maintain energy security and keep energy costs low as the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues, the geopolitical environment is ripe for exceptional government support of green industries.