Chinese industrial robot companies: the market is very cold
"The market is very cold, it is very difficult to make money, and the practitioners are very hard." Wu Fengli, chairman of Guangdong Tuo Si Da Technology Co., Ltd., summed up the overall situation of China's industrial robot industry in the past year.
Products tend to be homogeneous, price competition is fierce, manufacturing is co-extruded upstream and downstream, and venture capital is becoming more cautious... After nearly a decade of rapid development, the robot industry has experienced deaf in 2018, and industry players feel There has never been pressure. At the same time, every company is doing its best to find a way to cross. A number of corporate leaders told Chinese economic reporters that China's industrial transformation and upgrading have a strong demand for robots, because they are optimistic about the market prospects, so they chose to stick to them.
The trend of industrial growth has not changed
Statistics show that the output of industrial robots in China has increased year by year, and it has grown steadily. In 2015-2017, it increased by 21.7%, 34.3% and 68.1% respectively. However, in 2018, it only grew by 6.4%, and it suddenly fell to single digits. In some months, there was even a negative growth, which is in stark contrast to previous years. In the past few years, industrial robots appeared as highlights in the National Bureau of Statistics' annual statistical bulletin on national economic and social development, and were not mentioned in 2018.
In this regard, industry entrepreneurs did not show too much pessimism. At the 6th China Robot Summit held in Yuyao, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, Liang Yanxue, executive vice president of the Institute of Intelligent Technology of Guangdong Bo Zhilin Robotics Co., Ltd., said that the industry is characterized by “big and small”. . The 2018 industrial robot production rate reduction is a stage in the "spiral rise" of the industrial robot industry.
Liang Yanxue told reporters that the entire industry has not changed the robot pull, and the trend of the industrial robot industry to maintain growth has not changed. He said that from the car to the 3C to the new energy, the demand for robots in various production links in various industries exists in large numbers.
“Every industry can't maintain rapid growth for many years.” Xu Fang, vice president of Shenyang Xinsong Robot Automation Co., Ltd., said that the slowdown in growth is normal.
With the overall cooling of the industry, there are also good robot companies. According to the data, Tuo Si Da's revenue in 2001 was 1.198 billion yuan, and net profit increased by nearly 25% year-on-year. Wu Fengli said that the company's more than 800 application engineers are more busy than the "996", especially at key stages.
Despite the increasing market challenges, Wu Fengli is still optimistic about the future. His reasons come from three aspects: China's demographic dividend is gradually disappearing, and the application of more robots will be an inevitable trend; with the application of new technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things of Everything will change the previous production methods, and the robots will play a role in it. The key role; economic and social development requires a large number of robotic products, but China does not have a large robotic enterprise like the "four big families" of global robots. In the blank area of China's manufacturing powerhouse, there should be a place for Chinese robotics companies.
Liu Yunhui, a tenured professor of mechanical and automation engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, analyzes logistics robots. The logistics industry is tired and the wages are not high. It is difficult to attract young people. At the same time, the industry is developing rapidly. In 2018, the "double 11" one day e-commerce There are 1.3 billion parcels to be processed, so in the long run, there is no doubt about the market space for logistics robots that handle handling, sorting, and packaging.