Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 Yuanyi Capital
Some foreign media commented that the Beijing Winter Olympics just passed, which is a realistic version of the "robot story".
From the Winter Olympic Village to the competition venues, intelligent and cool service robots such as inspection and epidemic prevention robots, guidance robots, food delivery robots, killing robots, etc., are busy inside and outside the stadium. Such a lively army of robots points to the fact that on the one hand, service robots are entering our lives at a speed visible to the naked eye.
On the other hand, professional VCs/PE such as Sequoia China, Hillhouse Capital, and SoftBank have long been laid out, Internet giants such as Meituan, Tencent, and ByteDance have entered one after another, and even industrial capitals such as Country Garden, Gree, and Dajiang have also competed according to their enthusiasm for robots. This is in stark contrast to the current layoffs, salary cuts in Internet factories, and the capital market is almost "hibernating", and service robots seem to have entered the "spring" in advance.
First, from the "bubble" to the "useful", the robot mouth dividend has arrived
The attitude of the capital market is undoubtedly the best perspective for judging an industry. Incomplete statistics, in 2021, there were 113 financing incidents related to the service robot track, with a financing amount of more than 44 billion yuan, and in January 2022 alone, at least 18 financing incidents occurred in the robot industry.
The lively financing phenomenon undoubtedly sends two signals to the outside world: one is the unabated investment of money, which represents the increase in demand for service robots; the other is that service robots are still in the development stage, and the above figure is not a fanatical investment amount, and almost different categories, representing that capital is still in the stage of "casting a wide net" in the field of service robots.
Although the outlet for service robots has emerged, it can be seen that capital still maintains a cautious attitude in investment. Because of the service robot industry, it has been repeatedly tested on the edge of large-scale application. According to the data of China Industry Information Network, the current market penetration rate of commercial service robots is only 3%-5%.
When discussing the bottleneck of commercialization, the "just need theory" has become the most mentioned answer, and it is also a problem that the robot entrepreneurship industry needs to think deeply about. In response to this problem, the vice president of Yuanyi Capital said that for To B enterprises, although cost reduction and efficiency increase are just needed, the entire market is not yet mature.
Service robot development history
You know, the development of service robots has been said to be more than half a century, when will the market mature?
To put it bluntly, it is necessary to realize the deterministic value of artificial substitution. In most people's daily experience, service robots are more like "mascots" in shopping malls, restaurants, hotels and other scenes. I don't know if everyone has such a feeling, obviously the restaurant has a food delivery robot, but in most cases, it is still the waiter who sends you. On the one hand, the restaurant can only afford one or two of the few, and the high maintenance cost is not discussed, on the other hand, it cannot replace the waiter to pour water and other humanized services. The same is true for shopping malls, although the guidance robot travels around, it seems that only children are willing to interact with it, and adults prefer to ask the front desk when encountering problems, which shows that its refinement needs to be improved.
In this regard, an industry insider pointed out that in relatively closed and determined scenarios, when the standardization of service processes is high, the practicality of service robots will be stronger. However, the environment like shopping malls and restaurants is slightly noisy, voice interaction is easily disturbed, coupled with strong consumer mobility, resulting in less contact opportunities between passenger flow and robots.
Therefore, each industry needs to calculate the commercial balance between the constraints of real demand, substitution cost, and mass habits, which makes it take a certain amount of time for the large-scale landing of service robots.
But from the perspective of the process of social development, it has reached a critical point, so that human society has moved to a situation where it has to seek help from robots. First, the emergence of just need scenarios, due to the concept of "non-contact service" heating up by the epidemic, the service robot who is in danger of being ordered to deliver meals and drugs not only reduces the probability of medical staff being infected, but also makes the service robot industry truly aware of what is "demand" and what is "just need".
Second, in the case that it is difficult for the working population to have a significant breakthrough in the short term, replacing human beings with basic services through service robots has become an effective means to effectively enhance the competitiveness of urban service industries, reduce the cost of living of residents, and further enhance the rate of national urbanization.
The third is the landing of new infrastructure, such as 5G, Internet of Things, cloud computing, especially like semantic recognition GPT-3, etc., the maturity of AI technology, so that the pain points of service robots, such as lack of intelligence, low efficiency and other issues have been optimized, the market will be further broadened.
Second, robot investment: technology can not determine everything
In the face of the "machine service era" that has already begun, the market is opening the prelude to the knockout round. Under the wave of robot investment, China has accumulated nearly 400,000 robot-related enterprises throughout the country. At the same time, there is also a large wave of robot companies on the way to deregistration. Why is that?
One of the views given by Taihe Capital is that the technical principle itself does not constitute a solid barrier, and the temporary lead in technology does not mean sustained commercial success, and the latecomers can also get a piece of the market.
Insiders know that there are very few monopolistic core technologies in the robot industry, so to stand out and grab the track, it is bound to be "people have my superiority". Where are the advantages? It must be based on the solution and data accumulation under a deep understanding of the industry, which is simply four words: scene application. Sequoia China Investment Vice President said that robots are divided by scenes in the future, and truly understanding the scene will become one of the core competitiveness of robots.
When technology is not absolutely superior, which new scenarios are getting more attention? According to the application environment of robots, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) divides robots into industrial robots and service robots. Service robots in turn include home, medical and public service robots. In terms of segmentation, there are some new scenarios in To B and To G that are worth paying attention to:
First of all, under the increasing clinical demand for precision surgery, surgical robots have stood on the market of tens of billions. According to the data of CICC Research Report, the domestic surgical robot market size will exceed 70 billion yuan in 2030. At the end of 2021, the micro-invasive robot that landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange once had a market value of more than 60 billion yuan. Such an increase in the rate of return on the cost and market demand will inevitably make the capital "moved".
Secondly, warehousing logistics is also the main scene that urgently needs service robots to exert their power. In the past decade, e-commerce, express delivery and other industries have ushered in rapid development in China, which has greatly stimulated the demand for warehousing automation. According to data released by Research & Markets, China has become the world's largest market for warehousing and logistics robots, with annual sales expected to reach the trillion level by 2026. But as the most competitive scenario for service robots, new startups are heading for a deep battlefield.
Vertically deepen the application scenarios of "warehouses", such as the development of subdivisions of the e-commerce industry, or the expansion of warehouse scenarios in more industries (such as shoes and clothing, food, books, etc.); horizontally, expand the traditional "warehouse" application scenarios, such as expanding upstream to more complex production links, and downstream to sales links with higher demand for order efficiency.
Finally, with the aging of the population and the rising number of disabled people, rehabilitation robots have a clear social value. For a long time, mainland medical care has always faced the problem of "heavy treatment, light rehabilitation", so the number of medical personnel, rehabilitation engineers and resources in the mainland are very tense, and the potential for unicorns in rehabilitation robots is very huge. According to the data of the Prospective Industry Research Institute, it is expected that in 2025, the scale of the rehabilitation medical market will exceed 200 billion yuan.
When choosing the target, Yuanyi Capital has a dimension behind it: not only to meet the immediate needs, but also to upgrade intelligent technology and optimize service experience. Because in complex and vertical application scenarios, service robots often play a role in three levels:
The first is to solve the data problem of the actual scene. Only by solving the problems of data inconsistency and data loss and forming a closed loop of data can we use past data accumulation to make correct predictions about the future.
The second is to solve the efficiency problem of the use case. In the future of human-machine collaboration, service robots should not only replace people, but also exceed the efficiency of people, and only the benefits of certainty can meet customer expectations.
Finally, it is necessary to solve the problem of intelligent central control of the entity scene. Based on different scenarios and different needs, many intelligent devices and service robots will be born in the future, each of which will inevitably interfere with each other independently, which requires a "housekeeper" role.
With the help of supply, demand and policy, the report predicts that the market size of service robots will double from 28.38 billion yuan in 2020 to 75.18 billion yuan in 2023, which also means that the market will have more room for development.
Third, the ecosystem, C2M, talent, service robot extroversion opportunities still exist
Objectively speaking, the gap between China and developed countries such as Europe and the United States in the field of service robots still exists, because the gap between time and technology is a system engineering.
Robots are the same as new forces building cars, involving supply chain relations, upstream and downstream management, design and optimization of the whole machine system, and so on. Although many terminal products of China's service robots have achieved benign commercialization, there are still technical links in the industrial chain that need to be broken through.
Taking the service robot operating system as an example, in the global competitive landscape, the old open source system occupies the mainstream market, and most of the mainstream robot operating systems are based on the Linux kernel. For example, the international ROS, Android system, the domestic UBTECH operating system ROSA, Turing robot operating system Turning OS, etc., including Microsoft also launched the WindowsOS robot operating system used in the field of medical robots.
In the process of integrating new technologies, a new ecology is also taking shape. The real large-scale landing of intelligent service robots is inseparable from the joint development and exploration of many upstream and downstream partners. Therefore, to create a domestic service robot operating system, so that the robot has a "Chinese soul", or will become a field that needs to integrate global software and hardware resources to break through.
The opportunity for the latecomers to live lies in the advantages of domestic flexible intelligent manufacturing, and domestic service robots may be able to seize the market share of foreign brands in the low-end market with the advantage of cost performance and new consumption. The reason is simple, although the first-mover advantage accumulated by Europe and the United States as a whole is obvious, they are slower to iterate. For example, if Germany takes a year of iterative work, China may complete it in two months.
As the world's largest manufacturing country, China has the world's most complete industrial catalog, coupled with China's years of deep-rooted infrastructure construction, China has the best supply chain network, creating the world's most cost-effective market, making it possible to reduce the cost of any smart hardware products. At present, the feedback mechanism of different links in the mainland service robot industry chain tends to be complete, the upstream and downstream cooperation model of "core components - ontology manufacturing - integrators" has gradually taken shape, supporting insurance and other services have also begun to emerge, and the industrial ecology has gradually been established. At present, China is still emphasizing the "double cycle", in addition to consumer goods, science and technology can also be "double cycle". The combination of technology, market and production at home and abroad has also greatly improved the speed of product development and commercialization.
On the future competitive battlefield, the talent reserve of robots will enable China's service robot industry to achieve a wider range of competitive construction. In the robot industry, talent is the lifeblood of the enterprise. Under the catalysis of the "double reduction" policy, STEAM education in the mainland, including science literacy, robot programming and software programming, is expected to usher in a big outbreak, iResearch statistics, in 2021, the mainland STEAM education market size of 42.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth rate of 35.4%, the next three years of CAGR is expected to be about 16%.
epilogue:
Although the star entrepreneurs in the track are active, such as the "three brothers who build cars" and the domestic leaders such as the mobile phone "Huami OV", the service robot is now a precursor to prosperity.