China aggressively adopts robotic automation

American inventor George Devol is credited with founding the very first industrial robotics company. In 1954, Devol opened Unimation and began work on its flagship robot called Unimate. Unimate was basically a hydraulic arm used to lift heavy loads and it was first installed at a GM diecasting plant in Trenton, N.J.

By 1961, the company was able to produce these robots in volume and soon the Unimate 1900 series of robots were commonplace in diecasting plants.

Raconteur Johnny Carson even featured the Unimate robot on the Tonight Show where it performed several tricks, including conducting the show’s band.

It was the perfect start for the industrial robotics era.

If you fast-forward to today, the industrial robot market is growing in most major markets. According to the “World Robotics” report produced by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), 553,052 industrial robots were installed in 2022, a year-over-year growth of 5 per cent.

It’s not Western demand that is powering this growth, however, because 73 per cent of these newly deployed robots were installed in Asia, another 15 per cent were installed in Europe, and only 10 per cent in the Americas.

IFR expects the 2023 numbers to grow by 7 per cent.

China is by far the world's largest market for industrial robots. It’s the Michael Jordan of installing robots.

In 2022, the number of robotic installations in China grew to 290,258 units. This is more installations than the rest of the industrialized world put together. As a comparison, the No. 2 country was Japan, with 50,413 industrial robots installed.

Germany (25,636 units), Italy (11,475 units), and even France (7,380 units) all outpaced Canada (3,223 units). In fact, of all the G7 countries, only the U.K. had fewer installs than Canada with 2,534. Canada’s demand dropped by 24 per cent when compared to the previous year.

The U.S. saw an increase of 10 per cent to 39,576 units, with the main growth driver being the automotive industry, which increased its install base by 47 per cent.

In Mexico, installations grew by 13 per cent to 6,000 units.

Many in the manufacturing world are expecting some kind of slowdown in 2024. According to the IFR, however, this is not expected to affect industrial robotic installation numbers. Instead, it expects more than 600,000 units will be installed worldwide in 2024.

If you’re keeping score, another metric to keep an eye on is density, which is the number of robots per capita. South Korea is by far the leader in this area. The rest of the top 10 (as of 2021) are Japan, Germany, China, Sweden, U.S., Switzerland, Italy, Canada, and France.