The top 80 global machine tool manufacturers have seen customers struggle to access to traditional finance and turn increasingly to leasing products, according to the financial arm of German manufacturer Siemens.
Siemens Financial Services (SFS) found 84% of the companies it surveyed said their customers have experienced difficulty accessing traditional bank loans to renew their equipment and meet coming demand for their own products.
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As a result, the customer base has turned to the machine tool manufacturers more and more to meet their financing needs with over 60% of the surveyed manufacturers seeing an increase in demand for leasing products.
The result has been that 55% of machine tool users now use leasing as their principal funding source, according to the survey.
The SFS report said these companies are often specialist component manufacturers "anchored in the supply chains of high value-added manufacturing such as vehicles, aircraft, machinery and medical devices."
Brian Foster, head of industry at SFS, said the inability to access traditional funding has led to machine tool end-users ‘sweating’ their equipment and added: "However, they need to upgrade to more productive, more energy-efficient alternatives if they are to remain competitive in the long run."
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By GlobalDataSFS surveyed 80 machine tools manufacturers with sales across China, France, Germany, India, Poland, Russia, Spain, the UK, the US and Turkey, between July and August 2013.
