by Dan Roberts
@cambashi_dan
LinkedIn
Cambashi’s Managing Director, Peter Thorne, once again gave Cambashi’s World Update presentation at this year’s COFES conference. This sets the scene for engineering software in terms of the economic growth driving demand and the actual expenditure on BIM, PLM and GIS software.
Summary
- The global economy is growing at its healthiest rate since 2011
- Improvement in investment growth, but from a low starting point
- Spend on Engineering Software as a proportion of value-added is growing
- The Cambashi heatmap (or digital quilt – thanks Marc Lind) shows some interesting intersections of country and industry…

The heatmap ‘quilt’ explained
This heatmap has the industries along the top – we split into just over 100 industry sectors. The sectors that spend the least are on the left, those that spend the most are on the right – you can see that Automotive OEM is the largest-spending sector.
Each row represents a country, which are listed on the right, with the largest-spending at the top, least-spending at the bottom. The usual suspects like the US are at the top, with emerging markets like Ukraine towards the bottom.
This chart picks out some unusual patterns – high growth is in red, low growth in green, so some countries (horizontal red lines) are growing fast, as are some industries (vertical lines). The highlighted countries have fast-growing Automotive sectors. Austria, Hungary and Romania have had significant investment from German car companies for years and offer lower-cost manufacturing options close to Germany. Brazil and South Africa may need a little more digging…
For the full World Update presentation and a look at growths for BIM and PLM, you need to head over to the COFES website. You can also check out what he said last year, so you can compare last year’s forecasts with this year’s actuals.