Our good friend Janusz Kowalewski of furnace builder Ipsen recently published this very interesting graph showing the size of the global heat treatment market broken down by captive vs; commercial heat treating and by region.

 

While we don’t know the original source of this graph or what qualifies as “heat treatment” it did certainly catch our attention. Estimates of the size of the industry always tend to get bogged down in a definition of what exactly constitutes heat treating. For instance, in the opinion of Gord Montgomery of “The Monty” carburizing is the purest form of heat treating with all others secondary and estimates of the size of the industry should reflect this.  However others would say that annealing of steel plates in a mill should also be considered as heat treatment-guesses at the size of the market always wrestle with this debate.

 

Certainly, we would agree that globally probably 15% of heat treating is done by commercial heat treaters with the % being higher in Germany as an example and lower in India.

 

The global division of market size is probably accurate based on our knowledge the industry and again makes for interesting reading.

 

So, there you go, if the size of the global heat-treating market is ever a trivia question at your local bar you can confidently claim that you know the answer.