The enthusiasm for financing in the robot industry has not diminished, and the total financing in the first two months has exceeded 10 billion

Financing of some robot companies in 2022 Mapping/Cheng Kuo

On March 15, the National Bureau of Statistics released the latest data showing that from January to February, the output of industrial robots was 76381 sets, an increase of 29.6% year-on-year, continuing to maintain growth.

"Comparatively speaking, the start of the robot industry this year is relatively mild, there is no 'high opening' trend last year, combined with the external economic environment and the consideration of the epidemic this year, the growth rate of the robot industry this year will be reduced, but there may be bright spots in the subdivision field, such as the core component field." Lu Hanchen, director of the High Engineering Robot Industry Research Institute, said in an interview with the China Times reporter.

The heat of capital to the robot industry is still undiminished. On March 9 alone, Blue Core Technology, FAO Robot, and Matrix Intelligence officially announced that they had obtained financing, totaling hundreds of millions of yuan. According to the incomplete statistics of the "China Times" reporter, in the first two months of 2022, there have been 50 important investment and financing events in the robot industry, of which 24 hundred million-yuan financing have occurred, accounting for nearly 48%, 16 tens of millions of financing, 5 undisclosed financing amounts, and the total amount of disclosed financing is about 10 billion to 14 billion yuan.

It is worth noting that there are 2 financing and listed companies - Obi Zhongguang and Innovation Qizhi, which are currently in the stage of IPO registration and IPO launch of the science and technology innovation version, respectively.

The amount of financing continues to grow

Since the beginning of this year, the amount of financing in the robot industry has continued to grow.

According to the reporter's statistics, compared with January last year, the number of major investment and financing events in the robot industry in January this year is not significantly different, about 20 cases, and there is no obvious bursting trend. However, comparing the total amount of financing disclosed, it can be found that the year-on-year increase in January this year was at least 48.8%. By February, there were 29 investments and financings in the robot industry, of which 15 were 100 million yuan financing, and the total amount of disclosed financing was between 5.4 billion yuan and 7.4 billion yuan.

The financing of the robot industry is hot and inseparable from the support of policies.

On December 28 last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "14th Five-Year" Robot Industry Development Plan and the "14th Five-Year" Intelligent Manufacturing Development Plan, aiming to accelerate the upgrading process of the mainland manufacturing industry.

In Lu Hanchen's view, "the release of the planning policy will largely bring confidence to the development of the robot industry segment, and at the same time, the top-level design will also guide more talents and funds into the robot field." ”

The robot industry should not only mention "quantity", but also "quality". Lu Hanchen stressed that the "14th Five-Year Plan" focuses more on "improving quality", more focus on the development of high-end and internationalization, and sets the expected goals and points out the goals and directions for the next five years.

The more refined field of robot financing enterprises can also be seen that the mainland robot industry is moving towards high precision.

In the 21 investment and financing in January, robot companies mainly involved in several major areas such as automatic driving, warehousing logistics, 3D vision, artificial intelligence, surgical/rehabilitation robots, special robots, service robots, etc., of which the two related fields of surgery/rehabilitation robots and warehousing logistics robots still maintained a hot investment status.

By February, the investment and financing of robot companies were mainly concentrated in the fields of intelligent/autonomous driving related, surgical/medical rehabilitation robots, software and services, and their investment and financing were all 5. The second is the field of machine vision, service robots and warehousing and logistics, with 3 investment and financing.

It is worth noting that among the 50 investment and financing in the first two months, 29 were the first round, angel round, Pre-A round, A round, A+ round and A++ round of financing, accounting for 56%.

Why capital is obviously more partial to enterprises in the initial stage of development, Lu Hanchen said: "In fact, it can not be said that capital prefers early projects, many subdivisions of the robot industry are still in their infancy, and these years are also the stage of innovation intensive for domestic manufacturers, from sensors, reducers, motors, controllers to robots, machine vision, system software, etc., you can see more and more entrepreneurial teams, which is also the gathering place where financing events occur." ”

At the same time, the scene of robot application is also gradually expanding, which also brings development opportunities to domestic robots.

"In the past, many foreign robot manufacturers are relying on the development of the automobile industry, in recent years, with the continuous improvement of the industry penetration rate of industrial robots, the general industry outside the automobile has made greater and greater contributions to the increase in robots, especially in the fields of 3C, new energy, metal machinery, etc., which are also the main battlefield of domestic manufacturers, and have seen many domestic robot manufacturers usher in high growth, downstream users based on the consideration of comprehensive factors such as cost, cost performance, and technical services, and will be willing to try to import domestic robot brands. This trend will become more and more pronounced in the future. Lu Hanchen said.

Major listed robot companies have accelerated the pace of expansion and research and development

Not only in the field of financing, since this year, major listed robot companies are accelerating the pace of expansion and research and development.

Eston (002747.SZ), a leading industrial robot company, said on the investor interactive platform on January 14 that the company's motion control products and robot products have been applied to the 5G product line and 5G base station construction in the 3C industry through system integrators. On March 17, Eston released an institutional survey announcement showing that the current robot production capacity can reach 20,000 sets per year after flexible transformation. In addition, the second phase of the Eston Robot Intelligent Industrial Park is under construction, planning to complete the infrastructure construction by the end of 2022, and start the ramping capacity in 2023, and finally achieve 50,000 sets of production capacity.

Robot (300024.SZ) said on the investor interactive platform on February 9 that the company has mastered the core technologies of robot motion control technology, servo system design technology, vision technology, force perception technology, etc., and developed a new generation of robot collaborative robot series products for precision manufacturing, which can realize man-machine joint operation.

According to the announcement of Eft (688165.SH) on March 10, it intends to sign a "Technology License Agreement" with robox, a shareholding company, in which ROBOX transfers and authorizes some of the technical source code and documents it owns to Eft to use and jointly develop a technology platform. At the same time, it also announced that it intends to acquire a total of 9% of the equity held by ROBOX shareholders for 2 million euros in cash, and after the completion of the equity transaction, Eft will hold 49% of the equity of ROBOX.

Eft said that the realization of the controller of this core component of the autonomous production is an important strategic goal and development plan of the company; the purpose of this transaction is to cooperate with the ROBOX strategy in the early stage, has initially realized the independent production of the controller, in order to further enhance the company's core competitiveness, obtain the underlying source code of the control platform, complete the construction of the company's robot core autonomous control platform, and realize the complete autonomy and control of the core technology of the controller.

Green Harmonic (688017.SH), a leading enterprise in the reducer, said on the investor interactive platform on March 14 that a relatively complete localization supply chain system has been established, and there is no risk of supply interruption of raw materials.

Responsible Editor: Xu Yunqian Editor-in-Chief: Gong Peijia