During the tumultuous last few years in the machine vision market, companies that have thrived have benefited from reinforcing their places in the value chain of industry. Successful businesses have often provided solutions from one end of production to another. In sectors ranging from agriculture and food inspection to semiconductor production, and from processes spanning image capture to the processing of resulting data in order to identify flaws in a process or defects in a product, the vision space is expansive and evolving — even amid the tumult. Ronald Müller, a managing consultant with Vision Markets GmbH, produced a market bulletin for Q4 2024 that reported overall revenue growth of just under 2% for the industry, which is an accomplishment, considering the steep drop in the first two quarters of the year. Companies such as Basler and OPT Machine Vision took a hit due to various market pressures. Others, particularly those focusing on overall vision solutions, experienced growth. Jenoptik and Antares Vision are among these firms. Encouragingly, orders for machine vision systems from semiconductor producers are trending upward, Müller said. And in this issue, Klaus Schrenker of MVTec Software GmbH writes that with the heavy demand for semiconductors, machine vision systems are necessary at all stages in which inspection and alignment are required for quality control, starting with wafer production and concluding with packaging, often with AI assistance. Read more here. And specific technologies, such as hyperspectral imaging guided by machine learning, are used during wafer inspection, as our departments editor, Dominic Acquista, writes in Vision in Action here. But Müller also said in his report that geography played a key role in the bottom line. Swedish businesses such as ABB and Atlas Copco, which owns ISRA Vision, Photon Focus, Quiss, and Vision Tools, saw moderate growth between 2.5% and 4% last year, while U.S. and Japanese companies such as Rockwell Automation and Omron projected declines of more than 8%. And as we begin 2025, the declared protectionist strategy of U.S. President Donald Trump is of no small note in the market report, although long-term effects of nationalist approaches to trade and development, such as tariffs, remain to be seen in Europe and Latin America, and the growing machine vision industry in India. The industry will doubtlessly continue to adapt to specialized processes from within the vision sector as well as from outside financial forces. Enjoy the issue!