In a new report, JPR undertook analysis of CAD software used to create drawings and models, and found that there are at least 5.15M CAD users across the globe. What’s more, as CAD tools continue to develop new capabilities and become easier to use their appeal has the potential to grow.
As far as the industry is concerned, that growth should translate to an annual revenue of $8.7B by the year 2017 with a compound annual growth rate of 4%.
While the CAD industry has only realized nominal growth over its nearly three-decade lifespan, times are changing. With subscription models being adopted industry wide, the capital required to adopt a CAD system is plummeting.
In addition, CAD environments are becoming much more flexible. Users now have the option of designing in both parametric and Sub-D modelling paradigms, which makes the software much more accommodating to users of all skill levels.
Finally, CAD environments are now on the verge of freeing themselves from expensive workstations. As CAD-makers continue to look to the cloud as a solution for computing, CAD environments will have the ability to operate on ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones—as well as cross the PC/Mac divide.
Given all of those reasons, I think JPR’s assessment of CAD growth from now until 2017 might be a bit modest. In the next few years, I imagine CAD will see an explosion in users.
Source: JPR