New orders for metal cutting, forming and fabricating machinery (manufacturing technology) totaled $338 million in January 2024, a 31% decline from December and a 3.7% decline year-over-year.

That’s according to the monthly U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders Report published by the Association for Manufacturing Technology.

By order value, January was the lowest level since January 2021, while the unit count was its lowest since 2016. AMT noted this indicates that the demand for manufacturing technology is still being driven by orders of highly-specialized, automated machinery.

Released March 12, the report showed that January metal cutting technology orders totaled $471 million, down 29.1% from December, while orders for metal forming & fabricating technology orders totaled $19 million, down 80.5% from December.

AMT said the considerable monthly decline was driven by contract machine shops — the largest customer of manufacturing technology — which saw January orders at their lowest level since July 2023 and a 27.1% decline from December 2023. The association added that contract machine shops are expected to continue experiencing subdued order activity in the near future.

“January is typically the slowest month for manufacturing technology orders in any given year, and 2024 may prove to be no different,” AMT said in its USMTO report. “Forecasters at Oxford Economics have predicted that global industrial production will increase 2.7% in 2024. This bodes well for manufacturing technology, as even non-durable goods producers require machinery that is built using the metalworking equipment tracked by USMTO. Indeed, Oxford Economics also presented a forecast at AMT’s Winter Economic Forum, predicting that manufacturing technology orders in the United States would increase nearly 8% in 2024.”

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