Recently, the field of industrial robots has ushered in a hot money.
Public information shows that FAO Robot recently completed more than 50 million US dollars in B round financing, led by source code capital, and followed by Capital, Alibaba, Meituan Dragon Ball, Zhong Ding Capital, Hillhouse and so on.
Looking back at the past year, the track of industrial robots is often favored by capital, and public data shows that in 2021, the number of domestic industrial robot industry financing exceeded 90, and the amount of financing exceeded 20 billion yuan.
At present, there are more than 114,000 industrial robot-related enterprises in the mainland, of which more than 46,000 newly registered enterprises will be added in 2021, with a growth rate of 72.97%.
Image source: Sky Eye Check
As the saying goes, if a worker wants to do a good thing, he must first use it. Obviously, under the spring breeze of digitalization and automation, industrial robots, as the "pearl at the top of the manufacturing crown", have a stronger sense of existence.
1
Blue-collar workers' "meal replacement"
In fact, the rise of industrial robots not only represents the progress of automation and intelligence, but also directly benchmarks the "labor shortage" problem in reality.
It is undeniable that the demographic dividend has touched the ceiling, the aging characteristics are prominent, at the same time, the times are changing rapidly, more and more young people would rather be takeaway workers, anchors, rather than enter the factory, after all, can not keep up with the pace of equipment, process iteration, labor shortage has become a big problem.
According to public data, it is expected that by 2025, the total number of talents in The 10 key areas of China's manufacturing industry will be close to 62 million, while the talent demand gap will be nearly 30 million people, and the gap rate will be as high as 48%.
In contrast, the advantages of industrial robots are highlighted.
With the rise of a new round of scientific and technological revolution, intelligent manufacturing continues to innovate and upgrade, especially in the post-epidemic period, industrial robots have a lot of uses, and continue to further penetrate into all walks of life. To some extent, industrial robots can replace a large number of manpower to undertake a lot of heavy work, improve efficiency and quality, and bring strong impetus to the development of the manufacturing industry.
It should be known that China has become the world's largest consumer of industrial robots for eight consecutive years, and the cumulative output of industrial robots of industrial enterprises above designated size in China will reach 366,000 sets in 2021, an increase of 44.9% year-on-year, setting a new record in history; shipments of 168,400 units, accounting for 44% of the global share. In addition, it is estimated that by 2025, the sales scale of Industrial Robots in China is expected to reach 105.1 billion yuan.
2
Technical barriers are difficult to break through?
Although the competitiveness of industrial robots in the mainland is constantly strengthening, this cannot hide the shortcomings of the entry target in terms of technology and other aspects, and the epidemic has magnified this pain point.
For a long time, the mainland's market share in this track has been monopolized by foreign companies, the main reason is that "the technology is inferior to people".
After all, industrial robots have high threshold technical barriers, and it is difficult for domestic related enterprises to cut in for a long time, and even the core components are dependent on imports.
Looking at the market competition pattern, overseas brands led by ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa Electric, etc. occupy a lot of market share in China's industrial robot industry, holding the high-end market with higher profits.
It can be said that in order to expand the industrial life cycle line, domestic robot companies need to enhance the competitiveness of core components.
From the perspective of the industrial robot industry chain, the main core components of the upstream are reducers, servo motors and control systems, the cost of this part accounts for 60% or 70% of the overall production cost, the profitability is also the highest, most of them are monopolized by overseas manufacturers, and mainly rely on imports, the localization rate is insufficient, and domestic robot companies urgently need to accelerate the pace of domestic substitution.
First look at the reducer, the current market is mainly RV reducer, harmonic reducer, due to this part of the machinery on the material molding, precision processing and assembly technology requirements, domestic RV reducer manufacturers also need to further catch up, in order to narrow the gap, after all, with the domestic robot acceleration release, RV reducer demand will also increase, it is expected that by 2025, the global reducer market size is expected to reach about 13.3 billion yuan, the annual compound growth rate of 15%, of which, the domestic RV reducer market size is expected to reach 8.8 billion yuan , with a compound annual growth rate of 50%.
At the same time, the servo motor, as the basic component of mechanical automatic control, also plays a key role in the performance of the robot. At present, although the internal volume of market competition is serious, it is still a foreign brand that holds the right to speak, while domestic brands have a large room for growth in maintaining the stability of products.
In addition, the control system can be regarded as the "brain" of the robot, which has high requirements for independent research and development capabilities, especially the technical problems on the core underlying algorithm to improve accuracy, stability and ease of use. Nowadays, some domestic robot manufacturing enterprises have realized the independent production of controllers, but compared with overseas, there are still certain deficiencies in technology accumulation.
Overall, although the current mainland robot industry started late, it has developed rapidly, but it still needs to break through the bottleneck in the key core technology, and it is not competitive enough in high-end supply, and it is urgent to go to a higher level in terms of high precision, high stiffness and high sensitivity.
3
epilogue
The banner of industrial revitalization has been flying high, the process of automation and intelligence has been accelerating, and industrial robots have seized the historical opportunity of intelligent transformation, and in recent years, its development space has been further explored.
Capital also can't hold back, flocking to find and bet on new targets, but this boom also needs to think calmly, don't just stare at the so-called big blue ocean of the industry, pay more attention to the real technical strength of such targets, product landing capabilities, etc., after all, the overheated rush to invest more needs to be pragmatic.