In 2023, the opportunity for domestic robots is to go overseas! Go overseas! !

Thanks to the joint efforts of many domestic robot enterprises, China's robot industry has developed rapidly in recent years, and has made great progress in industrial robots , service robots , and special robots . Robots are widely used in all walks of life. Domestic robots have also begun to get rid of the low-end impression and can occupy a place in the mid-to-high-end market. The localization rate of robots continues to rise.

However, some problems inevitably emerged in the process, such as homogenization, price wars, etc., including package services and free trials. Some companies gave customers free trials or extremely low rental prices during the project testing phase. These practices did not bring more revenue and profits to the companies, nor were they conducive to the long-term healthy development of the industry.

The reason for this situation is that many competitions can only be zero-sum games. Although my country is the world's largest robot market, it is not large enough to allow all companies to act arbitrarily and cannot satisfy the growing appetite of many robot companies.

Ultimately, as a high-tech industry, the development of robots is gradual. It is impossible for them to develop to the extreme state all at once and completely replace all manual labor. The market demand has become infinitely large. At this stage, for enterprises, exploring more real application scenarios is the top priority.

As domestic robots face difficulties in development due to internal competition, they naturally have to look for a larger market, and looking around, that market is undoubtedly the overseas market. If the overseas expansion of robot companies in the past was just an attempt to explore possible surprises, then now in 2023, it is the standard for companies that want to continue to develop and become bigger and stronger.

Overseas demand for robots continues to grow

A report from McKinsey pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic in the past three years has led to a large-scale loss of labor, and many of these workers will not come back. Surveys show that 44% of people have little interest in returning to work in the next six months. If companies do not fill these gaps, it may hinder normal production. Last year, the United States had a shortage of 4.8 million employees.

For enterprises, what they need is not individual employees, but a stable workforce. In today's labor shortage situation, and in order to guard against uncertain risks, using robots to replace employees has become a good choice, and this is the opportunity for domestic robots.

At present, there are mainly two roadmaps for domestic robots to go overseas:

First, developed countries such as the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea are facing serious problems of aging and high labor costs. The labor shortage problem in various industries is particularly serious, and it is inevitable to accelerate the trend of "replacing people with machines".

The second is markets with rapidly developing manufacturing industries such as Latin America and Southeast Asia. Although these regions have sufficient manpower and low costs, due to factors such as education level and willingness to work, work efficiency is generally low and cannot meet the labor demand of industrial transfer.

Vietnam, for example, is now accelerating the transfer of the global manufacturing industry and has an even more urgent demand for automation. Major manufacturers including BYD, Foxconn, Samsung, Intel, and LG are all planning to build Vietnam into a production base. However, Vietnam's population is less than 100 million, and young people are not enthusiastic about assembly line work, resulting in a labor shortage in factories in stark contrast to the booming manufacturing industry.

Industry insiders said that overseas factories, warehouses, restaurants, and hotels have long faced the problems of high employee turnover and rising wages. Therefore, many such business owners are willing to try various robots to achieve automation. All robot companies should seriously consider overseas markets. The labor shortage situation overseas is far more severe than in China.

Domestic robot companies are accelerating their layout in overseas markets

In fact, today's leading domestic robot companies are accelerating their layout in overseas markets. As these companies have developed to the present, if they want to continue to expand their market and become internationally renowned robot companies, entering overseas markets has become an inevitable choice.

For example, Estun, the leading domestic industrial robot company, has acquired or invested in a number of European and American upstream and downstream industrial robot companies since 2016, including Italy's Euclid Labs, Britain's Trio, Germany's CLOOS, MAi, and the United States' Barrett. Last year, its overseas market revenue accounted for more than 20%.

Another leading industrial robot company, Huichuan Technology, defines 2022 as the year of internationalization. The company has begun to vigorously expand its international business, investing personnel and resources in overseas markets. It believes that in terms of revenue growth, it is expected that the growth rate of overseas business will be higher than that of domestic business in the next few years.

Collaborative robots Companies are going overseas collectively, and even regard overseas markets as more important markets. Companies including JEKA, Aobo, Yuejiang, Elite, Daju, and Luoshi have all established overseas business departments or branches to better explore overseas markets.

There are also logistics robot companies, such as Geek+, which started to expand overseas in 2017 and has a local delivery team of hundreds of people overseas. It continuously improves the stability of its robot products and its ability to respond to problems and provide services in a timely manner. In 2022, its overseas revenue accounted for 70%.

Not only in the field of industrial production, but also in commercial services, the overseas market also has a great demand for robots. For example, Purdue Technology, a commercial delivery robot company, once misjudged market demand, which led to a stalled expansion and problems in the company's operations. It only relied on the overseas market to save the "defeat". Since 2020, it has started to go overseas on a large scale, and the proportion of overseas sales has increased rapidly, from 8% in 2019 to more than 80% at this stage.

In fact, domestic robots are quite competitive when exported. Domestic application scenarios are huge and complex, and customer demands are varied and repetitive. This has enabled a number of companies to develop a strong ability to solve practical needs. In addition, domestic robots have cost-effectiveness advantages. After all, companies use robots in the hope of reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Robots that are too expensive will lose their significance as substitutes.

In short, while domestic robot companies continue to improve their competitiveness in the domestic market, they must also actively go abroad and participate in international competition. Only by moving forward courageously can they continue to move forward. Now in the post-epidemic era, the global trend of replacing people with machines is becoming more and more obvious. It is a good time for a number of companies to show their talents.