Recently, the China Robotics Industry Alliance released data. Last year, the market share of domestic industrial robots fell below 27%, down 6 percentage points year-on-year, the first decline in five years. Since 2013, China has been the largest consumer of industrial robots for five consecutive years. Benefiting from strong market demand, the scale of the domestic robot industry has maintained a high growth rate of 20% in the past five years. Industry experts said that the current industrial robot industry is at a critical stage of transformation and upgrading. China should focus on upgrading core key technologies, guiding the development of the industry, and actively deploying the next generation of robots to win the opportunity for the industry to move towards the middle and high end.

  

In 2017, the domestic industrial robot production reached 131,000 units, an increase of 81% year-on-year. By the end of 2017, there were more than 6,500 robot-related enterprises nationwide.

  

In recent years, various levels of government in China have issued a series of supportive policies and measures, and the robot industry has made great progress. Zhao Yicun, an engineer at Tianjin Science Research Institute, said that the development of China's robot industry is showing new features of accelerating the transition to mid-to-high end. It has significantly improved its core components and system integration, and some aspects have approached or exceeded international standards. However, industry experts also pointed out that due to the lack of core technologies for key components such as precision reducers, controllers, servo systems and high-performance drives, the overall competitiveness of domestically-owned branded industrial robots in the international market is still not high.

  

Qu Daokui, president of Xinsong Robot Automation Co., Ltd., said that there are still low-end applications in China's robot products. "The vast majority of domestic robots are used in low-end fields such as handling and palletizing, but the results are not obvious in the fields of multi-degree-of-freedom robots, interactive robots, and fully autonomous mobile robots."

  

With the first-mover advantage and technological accumulation, ABB, Yaskawa, FANUC and KUKA have occupied a high share of the domestic industrial robot market, especially in the field of high-end industrial robots. The market share of domestic robots only accounts for about 30%, and most of them are mainly assembly and processing.