While Chinese factories have been using more robots, they have also gotten better at making them. The government has used public capital and policy directives to spur Chinese companies to become leaders in robotics and other advanced technologies.
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Worldwide, robots and artificial intelligence are playing an increasingly prominent and disruptive role in manufacturing. Factory robots range from machines that weld car parts together to claws that lift boxes onto conveyor belts. As technology helps factories become more efficient, some are making do with fewer workers and altering the roles of others.
Over the past decade, China has embarked on a broad campaign to use more robots in its factories, become a major maker of robots and combine the industry with advances in AI.
Chinese companies have benefited from a national push that mirrors how the country’s electric vehicle and AI industries have grown, said Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at Omdia, a tech research firm.
“This is not a coincidence,” Su said. “It has taken many years of investment by Chinese companies.”
China’s drive for factory automation has been a key part of achieving its position as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. Factories in China have installed more than 150,000 robots each year since 2017. At the same time, manufacturing output ballooned. By the start of this year, factories in China were making nearly a third of all manufactured goods worldwide, more than the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain combined.
Robot installations fell last year, compared with the year before, in all four of the next largest factory robot-using countries: Japan, the United States, South Korea and Germany. Japan installed 44,000.
Until last year, China installed more imported robots in its factories than domestically made ones. But last year, nearly three-fifths of the robots installed in China were also made in the country.
