Earlier this year, there was a piece of news that didn’t make much of a splash, but it was noteworthy.

On February 14, Helu Industrial New Town signed contracts with Merkamand Robot and Maggar Robot. 36 KR Anhui noted that the Mercamand East China headquarters will be located in Anhui Lujiang County.

Mecamander and Mecga robot are the “unicorn” and leading enterprises in the subdivision of the domestic industrial robot industry. Behind that lies an important track that China is trying to catch up with: industrial robotics.

Unlike Musk’s Optimus, which has a human shape, the industrial robot is mainly a robot arm, which has been hailed as the crown jewel in the manufacturing industry.

Since 1982, when the Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed the country’s first industrial robot, China has started to catch up in the industrial robot circuit. At the end of 1993, there were 610,000 installed industrial robots in the world, of which China accounted for a tiny fraction. By 2022, however, the number of industrial robots in China reached 1.357 million.

After decades of development, although domestic industrial robots have made breakthroughs in precision reducer, intelligent controller and other aspects, but at present 70% of the domestic market is still represented by the “four big families” (Fanuc, ABB, Kuka, Yaskawa) as the international famous brands occupied. But it also brings a broad market opportunity of “domestic substitution” for domestic industrial robots.

Anhui noted that in addition to Lujiang County, which is actively introducing domestic industrial robot companies, Wuhu’s leading robot enterprise Efu went public in 2020, becoming the first listed company on the Science and Technology Innovation board in China with the whole industrial chain of industrial robots as its main business.

What are the factors restricting the development of domestic industrial robots in the important stage of the transformation from defense to attack? How does Anhui lay out its industrial robot industry?

Accumulate steadily

Industrial robot track heavy qualification, high threshold. As early as in the 1980s, China began to do industrial robot research and industrialization exploration, but in the following 20 years, the domestic industrial robot did not appear a scene of accumulation.

There are two main reasons. One is scenario requirements. In the 1980s and 1990s, the domestic manufacturing base was still very weak, such as automobile manufacturing, white goods, electronic appliances and other industries were still in their infancy, lacking sufficient scene demand.

Second, high-end talents. Industrial robot is a high-tech barrier industry that integrates machinery, electronics, control, sensors and other interdisciplinary technologies, requiring a large number of professionals. At that time, the supply of high-end talents in China was seriously insufficient, and it was difficult to meet the scientific research needs of industrial robots. Even the debugging and maintenance of imported equipment were subject to others.

In the 21st century, with the rapid development of China’s manufacturing industry and the guidance and promotion of the country, domestic industrial robot enterprises have emerged in large number. For example, Wuhu Efoot, which was originally designed to solve the problem of high maintenance cost of Chery’s car making equipment, seized the opportunity under the industrial tide and became a leader in the field of domestic self-owned robot brands.

In the face of the four families of robots, domestic industrial robots want to realize the “domestic substitution”, there are still many constraints. In addition to what the industry calls technical prowess, awareness and reverence for the needs of the field, there is also the accumulation of seed customers.

As industrial robot is a typical B2B industry, stability and reliability is the key indicator, which needs to be verified for a long time before it can gradually be recognized by the market and customers. Therefore, if the service case of the start-up is insufficient, the algorithm ability, stability and service experience can not be polished in the real scene, it is difficult to develop the market.

However, under the efforts of domestic industrial robot enterprises to catch up, domestic industrial robot has been from the low-end market to the high-end market, such as Eston, Huichuan Technology, green Harmonic and a number of leading enterprises. They have the core parts and components and foreign brands have the confidence to go head-to-head, at the same time in price and after-sales and other aspects have obvious advantages. Eston and Huichuan Technologies, for example, increased their market share from 2% in 2019 to around 5% in 2022.

In addition, with the support of AI, intelligent industrial robot enterprises such as Mercamander, Alite, Agile, and Jie Card have achieved rapid development with increased capital, established reputation in service, and achieved good market penetration.