Chinese automation giant pushes into Europe

Published: 27 February, 2024

The Chinese automation giant Inovance is continuing to push into the European market and at SPS demonstrated a selection of its technologies including AC drives, servodrives and motors, motion controls, CNC controllers, PLCs and HMIs. Although still having a relatively low profile in Europe, Inovance claims to lead the Chinese servodrives market (with 3.4m drives sold in 2022) and to be just behind ABB in the Chinese LV AC drives market (with 4.4m LV and MV drives shipped in 2022).

Globally, Inovance says it is the fifth-largest servodrives supplier and eighth in the LV AC drives market. The company employs around 20,000 people – up to 4,000 of them being engineers – and generated revenues worth $3.4bn in 2022, half of this coming from its industrial automation activities. Other areas in which it is active include electronics, electric vehicles and rail, and robotics.

At the 2023 SPS exhibition in Germany, Inovance highlighted a range of compact EtherCat-enabled Codesys controllers with quad-core processors and PLCopen-compliant axis controls. There are two models: the AM320 with dual Ethernet ports, four pulse axes, four encoder inputs and support for up to 16 expansion modules; and the AM522 motion controller with 16 synchronised EtherCat axes (and support for up to 127 EtherCat slaves), and built-in linear and circular interpolation.

Inovance was also showing an IP65-protected industrial touchscreen HMI (the HP800), available in 15.6- or 21.5-inch versions. LED indicators on the front panel allow users to view operating status, and the HMI includes VGA, HDMI and DP interfaces.

Inovance’s AM522 motion controller provides 16 synchronised EtherCat axes and support for up to 127 EtherCat slaves

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