Foreign Media: What Are The New Trends in China’s Robot Market?

Currently, China's development momentum in robotics and automation technology is extremely strong. According to statistics, more than half of the global industrial robots were sold to China last year, and in the first half of 2023, the trend is still rising, with sales of industrial robots reaching 144,288 units, a year-on-year growth rate of 17.1%.
Setting the trend: China market
Initially, these trends were seen primarily in electronics manufacturing, but have now spread to areas such as electric vehicles, batteries and solar power generation. Because China leads the world in these aspects, domestic companies also benefit greatly from economies of scale and rapid learning.
Key growth drivers
Although electric vehicles have passed the peak of new production capacity, they are still the main driver of robot sales. At the same time, electronics manufacturing, formerly the most important sales industry, has been affected by cooling domestic consumption and the transfer of production capacity to Southeast Asia. Market analysts expect that the production of solar panels will increase significantly, from 380 gigawatts at the beginning of 2022 to 750-800 gigawatts by the end of this year, and energy storage facilities are gradually becoming a new sales channel for cells. .
Progress of U.S. manufacturers
In recent years, domestic U.S. manufacturers have increasingly entered areas previously dominated only by foreign robotics companies. For example, last year, Eston, the top domestic multi-axis industrial robot manufacturer, sold more than 17,000 units in the Chinese market. Although it was lower than FANUC and KUKA, it had surpassed ABB and Yaskawa. In the field of SCARA robots, Inovance has successfully captured the market share of Epson and Yamaha.
Education and supply chain impact
The Chinese government attaches great importance to STEM education, which has also contributed to the emergence of a large number of professional talents. Coupled with the role of local supply chains that have emerged in recent years, the product development cycles of machine vision, industrial robots and collaborative robots have been greatly shortened, and costs have also dropped significantly.