How China plans to become the world's leading robot nation
The People's Republic no longer wants to be the world's factory floor – it wants to be the innovation driver. A factory visit where robots are taking over human tasks.
The People’s Republic no longer wants to be the world’s factory floor – it wants to be the innovation driver. Handelsblatt correspondent Stephan Scheuer visited a factory in China where robots are steadily taking over tasks from people.
Background
This report was made at the beginning of the state programme Made in China 2025, which identified ten key industries – among them industrial robotics. Even then the People’s Republic was already the world’s largest market for industrial robots: around 87,000 new installations were registered there in 2016, more than in Europe and America combined.
The acquisition of German robot maker Kuka by Chinese conglomerate Midea in 2016 was seen as a turning point in the debate about China’s technology offensive. For the first time a global market leader in a key technology passed into Chinese hands – and German politics discussed publicly for the first time the need to protect sensitive industries from state-linked investors from China. In 2018 a revised Foreign Trade Act followed, with stricter review rights for takeovers.
Today China is no longer merely the largest customer for industrial robots – it is increasingly developing its own brands. Companies such as Estun, Inovance, Siasun and Efort now compete with the established players ABB, Kuka, Fanuc and Yaskawa. While Chinese manufacturers served only around a third of the domestic market in 2013, their share has risen to over half by 2023. In simpler robot categories they now clearly dominate the home market.
The strategic significance goes beyond industry. China’s leadership sees robotics as the key to managing demographic change: the population has been shrinking since 2022, working-age cohorts are getting smaller and manufacturing wages have risen sharply over the past two decades. Automation is meant to help keep production costs competitive despite this.
A new dimension is the combination of robotics with artificial intelligence. Chinese manufacturers such as Unitree, Fourier Intelligence and XPeng Robotics are presenting humanoid robots controlled by large language models. Several provinces launched pilot programmes in 2024 for deploying such systems in factories, care facilities and public services. Whether this represents a genuine technological breakthrough or an intermediate stage will be decided in the coming years.