In recent years, China’s industrial robotics industry has experienced rapid growth, becoming the world’s largest market for six consecutive years. Widely applied across manufacturing sectors, it serves as a key pillar in transforming “Made in China” into “Intelligent Made in China.” However, challenges such as speculative hype and low-end competition have emerged during development. Experts urge the industry to pursue independent innovation and achieve high-quality growth to avoid low-price, low-level competition.
Currently, the scale of China’s industrial robotics industry continues to expand, with domestic brands covering multiple industries. In the first half of 2025, production reached 370,000 units, up 35.6% year-on-year. Yet, Chinese-made robots still lag significantly behind global advanced standards, particularly in core components—such as high-precision reducers and servo motors—which remain heavily dependent on imports. The market is dominated by foreign giants, constraining the industry’s move toward higher-end development.
The sector faces prominent issues including overcapacity in low-end production. Some companies engage in blind expansion, focusing their products on mid-to-low-end markets and competing solely on cost-effectiveness, resulting in repeated, low-value construction. Coupled with a lack of strict high-tech standards, disordered expansion of low-end capacity, and problems such as small enterprise scale and inconsistent product quality, these factors hinder overall competitiveness.
To address these challenges, industry experts have offered recommendations to guide high-quality development.
First, they suggest breaking down industrial boundaries and promoting cross-sector integration and innovation to foster new technologies, products, and applications, thereby building a healthy ecosystem.
Second, focus should be placed on improving product quality, abandoning low-price competition strategies, and overcoming critical technological barriers that affect quality, so that high-quality products and services earn market recognition.
Third, companies should target niche markets, deeply understanding demand in specific industries such as automotive, machinery, electronics, hazardous materials manufacturing, chemicals, and light industry, developing differentiated products to achieve strategic positioning.
Finally, deeper strategic cooperation among supply chain enterprises should be pursued, establishing mutually beneficial, equal, and collaborative business models to create a healthy and orderly market environment.
Experts emphasize that resolving the issue of low-end dominance in domestic industrial robotics hinges on continuously enhancing independent innovation capabilities. It is essential to align closely with market and industrial demands, concentrating efforts on tackling technical and quality challenges in key components and high-end products to strengthen the core competitiveness of local firms. On one hand, efforts must improve the stability and mass production capability of core components, break through technological barriers, and reduce reliance on imports. On the other hand, focus should be placed on key areas such as intelligent manufacturing and smart logistics, advancing domestic robotic products into high-value-added segments and mid-to-high-end markets.
Regarding application promotion, Academician Tan Jianrong from the Chinese Academy of Engineering advocates prioritizing innovative design, integrating it deeply with existing enterprise processes, and leveraging automation, digitalization, and intelligence to upgrade traditional manufacturing methods. At the same time, he calls for deep integration between industrial robots and technologies such as big data, pattern recognition, virtual reality, and lean production to fully unlock the robots’ potential and support the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing.
Today, China’s industrial robotics industry stands at a critical juncture, transitioning from scale expansion to quality improvement. Only by acknowledging gaps, addressing weaknesses, adhering to the path of independent innovation, and overcoming the trap of low-end competition can the industry achieve high-quality development, inject stronger momentum into the intelligent transformation of China’s manufacturing sector, and solidify its leading position in the global robotics industry.
Post time: Aug-10-2026
