Chinese industrial robot is puffiness?

In the roar of the machine, rows of uniformed assembly line workers repeated monotonous and tedious actions. This is a few years ago, Dongguan foundry is no more common scene. Now, this phenomenon is being changed.

Tang Ping’s main job every day is to check the completion of the assembly line. Different from previous years, as the head of the technical department of Jiahui Plastics & Hardware Co., Ltd., this year, he has no need to pay attention to the younger apprentice who was sweating. Instead, there are more than one hundred robots that can work continuously for 24 hours without stopping.

In recent years, "Dongguan enterprises to Xinjiang, high-cost recruitment, Jiangsu and Zhejiang enterprises to the west to rob people, Sichuan official organization of industrial workers return" and other dramas staged on the same stage, cheap labor is consumed. At the same time, rising labor costs, environmental pressure, and other issues are also plaguing labor-intensive companies. Therefore, "machine substitution" is constantly mentioned by people.

The data released by the International Robot Association shows that in 2013 China’s robot sales reached 36,500 units, an increase of 41% year-on-year, accounting for 20.5% of global sales. In 2014, sales of industrial robots in China reached 57,000 units, an increase of 55% over the same period last year. It accounts for a quarter of global sales and has become the world’s largest robot market for two consecutive years.

However, in the face of fast-growing market demand, the Chinese industrial robotics industry is "big but not strong."

According to incomplete statistics, by the end of 2014, more than 70 listed companies had acquired or invested in robots and intelligent automation projects, and the number of Chinese robot-related companies even exceeded 4,000.

What is disappointing is that at present, China's enterprises are mainly concentrated in the low-end, lacking core technologies, and 90% of the companies are under 100 million in size. It is reported that China purchased and assembled 36,500 industrial robots in 2013. Among them, foreign-funded robots are mainly based on high-end industrial robots. They almost monopolize high-end industries such as automobile manufacturing and welding, accounting for 96%; and domestic robots mainly use Handling and loading and unloading robots are the mainstays, and they are in the low end of the industry.

Lu Tie, director of industrial development research at the Institute of Industrial Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, mentioned earlier: “In the case of industrial robots, most of the core components of robots, such as precision speed reducers, controllers, servo systems, and high-performance drives, currently rely on Imports, and these components accounted for more than 70% of the total production cost, of which, 75% of the precision reducer was monopolized by Japan, domestic high-priced purchases accounted for 45% of production costs, while in Japan only 25%, China's procurement core The cost of spare parts is already higher than the overall selling price of foreign robots of the same model, and it is impossible to compete with foreign brands in the high-end robot market."

Due to this, the "four families" of the robotics industry (ABB, FANUC, Yaskawa, and Kuka) together accounted for more than 50% of the domestic robot market share.

Industry authorities are aware of the above issues.

Previously, the government proposed to cultivate 3 to 5 leading companies with international competitiveness and 8 to 10 supporting industrial clusters by 2020; the market share of high-end products will increase to more than 45%; robot density (the number of robots used per 10,000 employees ) Above 100, the world average of this figure is 58, while China is still less than 30.