• data-driven
• gripper
• end effector
• gripper market
• market analysis

The trend of digitalization and industry 4.0 has pushed many companies to transform. Industrial robots have become a fundamental component within any company. Closely related to industrial robots, there are grippers, that is the terminals of robots that manipulate the object in question.
The purpose of the paper is to understand if on the gripper market there is the possibility of opening a company that designs and/or produces grippers.

It was necessary to identify the companies present in the Italian and non-Italian sectors. After, it was analyzed what each identified company offered in terms of gripper and services to understand what the offer was on the market.
For the Italian companies, the paper continues with a focus on economic and financial performance, also trying to identify how important the gripper market was for each company, as the company's catalogs do not only present grippers. Thanks to this data it was possible to rank the companies to understand who was the leader in the sector and what were the power relationships between them.
This data collection phase is followed by the clustering phase of Italian companies. This subdivision is based on the data previously obtained and led to the identification of three clusters. One representing small-medium enterprises, one concerning a single company which, for reasons that we will see in the elaborate, is correct to be alone and finally a group of medium-large companies.
The cluster concerning small and medium-sized enterprises was the most interesting and was therefore studied in depth. It was clustered again and three sub-clusters were identified.
The three clusters have identified two distinct types of companies: one type is the one that works in the catalog, producing a range of grippers with a low degree of customization where the gripper represents an important product within their panorama, the other represents the 'opposite that is, design companies, these start from the customer's requests for the production of the gripper.
It can therefore be said that the sector internally presents a strong division in these two approaches.
The subsequent analysis of the attractiveness of the sector, using Porter's 6 Forces, was applied to both sub-sectors.
At the end, a macro-environment analysis was carried out to understand the dynamics and relationships within the sector using the data collected in the various previous steps.
In the last part of the paper is reported a conclusion on the question initially posed.