November 2024 a Good Month for Metalworking Machinery Sales
January 13, 2025Comments
November 2024 orders of manufacturing technology, measured by the U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) report published by AMT—The Association For Manufacturing Technology, increased 16.8% from October and 12.4% from November 2023. Year-to-date orders, however, were off 5.7% from the first 11 months of 2023.
After a slow start to 2024, orders of manufacturing technology began trending upward following September’s IMTS show, says AMT. This continued in November, with new orders nearly 30% above a typical November and at the highest order level for any November since 2021.
With the exception of September 2024, contract machine shops, the largest consumer of manufacturing technology, placed the largest order volume since March 2023. Meanwhile, aerospace manufacturers decreased their orders modestly from October but remained slightly above their 2024 average.
Although orders of manufacturing technology tend to correlate positively with interest rates over the long run, recent trends have shown more of the inverse correlation that conventional economic thinking would expect. This is in stark contrast to the previous example of an economic soft landing, where orders peaked along with interest rates and began to decline slightly as the Federal Reserve began loosening their monetary position. Given this trend, says AMT, along with a tendency for manufacturers to expend their capital budgets by year’s end, orders from December 2024 could show a strong end to an irregular year.
See also: Association for Manufacturing Technology
Technologies: Management