Breaking the Big Four

For a generation, the industrial-robot market belonged to the “Big Four”: Switzerland’s ABB, Japan’s Fanuc and Yaskawa, and Germany’s KUKA. In China, the world’s largest robot market, that era has quietly ended.

China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, a record and about 54% of all installations worldwide.^[1] More telling than the volume is the crossover: for the first time, Chinese manufacturers sold more industrial robots than foreign suppliers in their home market, taking a 57% domestic share, up from roughly 28% a decade earlier.^[1] And the shift is starting to export itself; China’s share of global industrial-robot exports rose to 16.7% in 2024 from 5.9% in 2020.^[2]

For the first time, China’s factories bought more home-grown robots than foreign ones. The Big Four no longer own the biggest market.

Uneven, and one of the Four is already Chinese

The takeover is uneven by sector: domestic suppliers now provide close to 100% of robots in textiles and around 80% in food and beverage, but only 31% in the precision-heavy automotive tier, where ABB, Fanuc and Yaskawa still hold ground.^[2] And one of the Big Four is no longer Western at all: appliance giant Midea bought control of KUKA in 2016 and completed a full squeeze-out in November 2022, taking the German champion private.^[3][4] Domestic leaders such as Estun, Siasun, Inovance and Efort are pressing the advantage.^[2]

The unevenness is the signal worth reading. Domestic robots winning textiles and appliances first, then stalling at 31% in automotive, traces the true difficulty gradient: the harder the reliability and precision demands, the longer the incumbents hold. That means the automotive and semiconductor tiers are both the last redoubt of the Big Four and the most valuable ground still contested. And the KUKA precedent looms over all of it; a foreign champion can be acquired outright, not merely out-competed, which adds a second path by which the remaining share changes hands.

The part that matters

The interesting frontier is the tier China has not yet taken. Commodity robotics is largely won at home; the value now migrates to the high-precision automotive and semiconductor segments where the incumbents still lead, and to exports, where Chinese makers are only beginning. We watch the sectors where domestic share is climbing from a low base, and the makers building the precision and service networks that the last, hardest 30% of the market demands.