In 2023, the recovery of the market is bound to come, but its "retaliatory recovery" may be less than expected. Among them, the field of core raw materials limited by the epidemic will have relatively large space for recovery and rebound, such as metal materials, non-metallic materials, composite materials, etc., while steel is one of the most commonly used materials by robot manufacturers, with huge growth space. However, there are several types of consumption recovery will be relatively slow, such as consumer-level and service-level robots. The categories of robots such as manufacturing and production will remain stable, which also means that it is difficult to see the rapid growth of the industry. The opportunity lies in whether a series of new technologies and new categories can be born to stand out in the stock competition.
The "new forces" of cooperative robots are on the verge of collapse
The new force of cooperative robots is very representative in the development of industrial robots. With the global robots entering the 3.0 era, "human-machine integration" has become an important development trend. As an important branch of robots, cooperative robots have risen rapidly and become the representative of intelligence, collaboration and digitalization. The application scenarios have become more and more abundant, and have evolved into a lot of commercial formats, which have entered our production and life.
Cooperative robots have strong technical advantages and market possibilities
In terms of technical characteristics, collaborative robots have just started in recent years. In terms of technologies such as surface force sensing, joint torque sensor, current estimation force feedback model, 3D vision, etc., the gap between domestic and foreign technologies is not large, or even at the same level. The development of new technologies will undoubtedly enable enterprises to meet different market needs.
This can also be seen from the market share. In the global collaborative robot market, although the Danish UoRobot still occupies the leading position, in the Chinese market, the domestic brands represented by Aibo, Jieka, Alite, Luoshi, Zhongke Xinsong, etc. have occupied about 70% of the share.
In addition to guarding the domestic market, domestic manufacturers have gradually extended part of the market overseas in the past two years. For example, Jieka Robot has a technology center in Japan and a special overseas business department responsible for market development; With its headquarters and R&D center in Beijing, AOBO also has overseas business departments specialized in the development of markets in Europe and North America, and will deploy technical personnel to cooperate with local agents to promote; Alite, Han's robot and Luoshi robot have also set up overseas offices to better develop overseas markets.
In the field of collaborative robots, China is expected to drive the pace of the global market. According to MIR DATABANK data, China's industrial robot market increased by 1.5% year-on-year in the first half of 2022. Under the situation of weak overall market growth, the growth rate of cooperative robots is far higher than the average market growth rate and other models, with a year-on-year growth of 22.2%. As domestic collaboration becomes more and more mature, technology is gradually approaching foreign investment, and more aggressive market strategies are superimposed. In the first half of 2022, foreign manufacturers in the automobile and 3C industries were greatly impacted by domestic cooperation, and the market share declined. Cooperative robots have become the representative of China's robot power.
With the continuous improvement of market recognition of cooperative robots, capital has also expressed great affirmation for cooperative robots. In the first half of this year, the total financing amount of the robot industry was about 12 billion yuan, of which the financing amount of the cooperative robot field was about 4 billion yuan. The cooperative robot has become the hottest segment of the robot industry. Among them, Car-Saving Robot announced nearly 1 billion yuan of round D financing, Alite announced hundreds of millions of yuan of round C financing, and Luoshi announced 400 million yuan of strategic financing. The amount of financing for new forces of collaborative robot enterprises ranked first.
Cooperative robot market will continue to develop strongly
According to ABIResearch, a market research institute, the global collaborative robot market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32.5% from 2020 to 2030, and the market size is expected to increase to $8 billion by 2030. Behind the huge demand for robots is not only the extreme requirements of the market for efficiency, but also the labor shortage problem faced by the global manufacturing industry, and China is no exception. The difficulty of recruitment is first reflected in the general jobs, because the repetitive work with low salary lacks the sense of achievement and attraction for young people.
At the same time, the difficulty of recruitment is also reflected in the gap of highly skilled talents. While replacing basic tasks, automation has also created many new jobs, catalysing the demand for highly skilled personnel. In recent years, China's high skilled talents have maintained a ratio of more than 2 for a long time. One technical and skilled talent corresponds to at least two positions, which can be seen in the degree of popularity.
By using safe, flexible and convenient cooperative robots to replace tedious, dangerous, repetitive and labor-intensive tasks, workers can focus on more valuable work, and improve their job satisfaction and sense of achievement while improving production efficiency. With the continuous acceleration of the digital transformation and the high labor costs, UoTech expects that the Chinese and global collaborative robot market will continue to present a blue ocean and maintain a strong momentum of development in 2023.