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Hanover Industrial Fair 2015 opens, focusing integrated industry for third year

Xinhua, April 13, 2015 Adjust font size:

The annual Hanover Industrial Fair, Hannover Messe, officially opened on Sunday night, focusing for the third year in a row the integration of conventional industry and IT sector.

Under the theme of "Integrated Industry-Join the Network" and with India as its partner country this year, the world's biggest industrial trade fair has attracted more than 6,500 exhibitors this year.

Participants of the fair have come from sectors of industrial automation, IT, power transmission and control, energy, production engineering and services and research and development.

Key topics at the fair would include integrated factory, 3D printing, collaborative robots, energy efficiency and smart grid.

At the opening ceremony, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the image of manufacturing industry is continuously changing, and a trend of integration of the industrial value chain has been seen in previous years in the Hanover trade fair. Her government is not only looking into the Industry 4.0, but also is promoting it.

On Tuesday, German government will officially launch a platform to develop Industry 4.0 in Germany. The platform would be led by German Economy Ministry and Ministry of Education and Research, and will be attended by business and industrial organizations.

"The trend towards digitization that is sweeping the economy is a powerful force for transformation in the world's manufacturing industries," said Jochen Koeckler, a member of the Managing Board at Deutsche Messe responsible for the trade fair, "manufacturers who turn their backs on collaboration and try to do everything in-house will ultimately lose out."

He said the message behind "Join the Network" is that the key challenges of the fourth industrial revolution, such as achieving universal standards for machine-to-machine communication, maintaining data security and finding new business models, can only be resolved through collaborations between all the stakeholders in the industrial process.

According to the fair organizer, 56 percent of the exhibitors came from outside Germany. China, with more than 1100 exhibitors, is the second strongest exhibiting nation only next to Germany. Endit