Looking back at the mobile robot industry in 2023, it is undoubtedly a year worth remembering.
The mobile robot industry has a wonderful performance in policy, product, technology, market and other aspects.
This year, a number of heavy policies were released, and the release of the "robot +" application action implementation plan at the beginning of the year declared the top-level design's concern for the robot industry.
In the product side, the humanoid robot heat swept throughout the year, not only a number of enterprises layout, but also frequent news of upcoming mass production; Unmanned forklift penetration is accelerating, upstream parts companies are riding the wind, and domestic alternatives are speeding up. Technological innovation has reinvigorated China's intellectual manufacturing force.
At the market end, going to sea is the new battleground. Whether following the footsteps of customers' overseas factory expansion, or searching for new opportunities on their own, the process of going to sea has been unstoppable.
When relevant enterprises have expanded the new growth curve of enterprises, the "mobile robot" industry, which has scientific and technological attributes and imagination space, is also favored, and technology giants such as Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, NetEase, and Meituan have entered the line of robots. The mobile robot market in 2023 is particularly lively.
The challenges remain. Although this year, new technologies and products, new markets and opportunities, let us feel that the future of the mobile robot field can be expected. However, enterprises are also facing many challenges. Compared with 2022, the financing of the mobile robot market this year is not optimistic, with a decrease in early financing and a decline in vitality. At the same time, the order is difficult, the payment is difficult, and so on, but also let some mobile robot companies in a dangerous situation.
Overall, 2023 is a wonderful year, let's review the ten key words of the industry this year.
01 Concerted efforts at the policy end
Since 2023, a number of heavy industrial support policies have been successively invested in the domestic robot market.
In January, 17 departments such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Robot +" application Action Implementation Plan, proposing to "double the density of manufacturing robots by 2025 compared with 2020" and other goals. Subsequently, including Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Henan, Hebei, Dongguan and other places, have successively introduced specific policies for the robot industry, focusing on the construction of robot industrial clusters, improving the ability of the robot industry chain, promoting the development of core components, and digging into the mature, emerging and potential application scenarios of robots.
Shanghai proposes to build 10 industry-leading robot head brands, 100 benchmarking demonstration robot application scenarios, and 100 billion yuan robot related industry scale. Promote the density of industrial robots in key industries of manufacturing to 500 units / 10,000 people, and significantly improve the depth and breadth of application in the robot industry.
Beijing proposed that the city's core robot industry income reach more than 30 billion yuan, and build a domestic leading and international advanced robot industrial cluster.
Concentrated efforts from the policy end are an important force to promote the growth of China's mobile robots.
02 Speed up the sailing process
The past two years have seen China's mobile robots make a big push overseas.
According to the statistics of Gaogong Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII), the number of mobile robots exported by Chinese enterprises in 2022 is nearly 19,000 units, and the proportion of orders exceeded 25% for the first time, reaching 25.87%. With more and more enterprises going to sea, the international market will gradually become the new main battlefield, and the overall overseas orders of domestic AGV enterprises are expected to exceed 30% in 2023.
In the choice of sea routes, China's mobile robot companies first go to Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea and other developed markets, with the domestic fierce competition environment tempered out of the mature program and service advantages to seize the market. The second is to go to the Southeast Asian market where e-commerce, logistics industry and manufacturing industry are developing rapidly, and open sales by virtue of high cost performance. The third is to follow the "Belt and Road" and other policies, play a differentiated strategy, and dig gold in Central Asia, Russia and other places.
In the way of going to sea, mobile robot companies mainly build localization teams in the target market; Or follow the footsteps of domestic customers, and cooperate with local teams to rapidly expand new markets.
At present, there are still few manufacturers that really gain a foothold overseas and get continuous positive feedback, and enterprises still need to deeply understand the differences between the application boundaries of products and their own capabilities.
03 New energy is flourishing
High-tech Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII) data show that due to the recovery of demand in various industries in the downstream application market, the growth of mobile robot orders is weak. Nearly 48,000 mobile robots were shipped in the Chinese market in the first half of the year, up 26% year-on-year.
In this case, the new energy field still performs well, especially the photovoltaic industry, which can be called a standout. GGII expects 2023 photovoltaic industry AGV sales will reach 19,000 units, an increase of more than 100%.
At the same time, for in-depth understanding of downstream application industry. In October this year, the Gaogong mobile robot team visited more than ten photovoltaic enterprises and deeply understood the opportunities of the photovoltaic industry's upstream and downstream intelligent intelligent manufacturing:
(1) Photovoltaic materials and equipment suppliers are relatively small affected by fluctuations in the photovoltaic industry, and are still in the expansion period.
(2) Overall, material manufacturers have short processes, and most of them will use automated production equipment, especially the first batch of ingredients, etc., and the overall degree of automation construction is OK.
(3) The winding and packaging links of the latter section are still semi-automatic, and a production line requires 2 to 3 manual support. Many companies have said to high-tech mobile robots that this part of the link has been looking for a suitable solution, and to get through this link can move faster to the full process automation and intelligence, but there is no relatively mature case on the market.
04 Financing trend is cold
In 2023, the capital is still in a "lying flat" state, and the problems of corporate profitability and financing difficulties are still prominent.
According to incomplete statistics from GGII, a total of 30 financing cases occurred from January to September 2023, with a financing amount of 2.285 billion yuan. From the point of view of the amount of financing, although it is close to the level of 2022, the amount of financing and a single financing is far from it. It can be seen that under the background of macroeconomic pressure, investors' cautious attitude has increased, and it is more difficult for mobile robot enterprises to obtain large amounts of financing. At the same time, money in the capital market further concentrated towards the head company, and the "Matthew effect" intensified.
In addition, it is worth noting that most of the financing projects are backed by local government participation, reflecting that local governments continue to increase support for high-tech industries and want to occupy a place in a new round of industrial development.
05 The rise of humanoid robots
Humanoid robots are hot from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.
Before you must choose to impact the "humanoid robot first stock", Tesla humanoid robot announced the latest progress, "Huawei genius boy" Zhihui Jun founded Zhiyuan robot, Yushu Technology launched the first general humanoid biped robot H1, Later, Xiaopeng Penghang and iFlytek announced their humanoid robot products at the same time, and tech giant Amazon also announced the introduction of humanoid robot Digit in its warehouse for trial.
At the same time that humanoid robots are making rapid progress, a number of related core parts manufacturers have benefited as a whole, and many parts manufacturers have expanded production capacity to seize the market.
In the fourth quarter, the progress of landing humanoid robots is accelerating. In October, Amazon announced the introduction of Digit, a humanoid robot, into the warehousing and logistics scene, mainly to help employees move, pick up and recycle bins. This move by Amazon is bound to attract the attention and imitation of "latecomers" and accelerate the process of commercialization of humanoid robots.
Recently, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Humanoid Robot Innovation and Development Guidance", which triggered hot discussion in the market. The Opinions mentioned that in order to promote the high-quality development of the humanoid robot industry, the two development goals of initially establishing an innovation system by 2025 and forming a safe and reliable industrial chain supply chain system by 2027, as well as five key tasks around technology, products, scenarios, industrial ecology and supporting capacity.
06 Unmanned forklift hot
In the subdivision of China's mobile robots this year, the growth momentum of unmanned forklifts is rapid.
In the first half of the year, in the case of the overall weak growth of mobile robots, unmanned forklifts have become the main product type to drive the growth of mobile robots, GGII is expected to 2023 annual unmanned forklift market forecast sales of 20,000 units, is expected to grow by more than 75%.
Gaogong mobile robot believes that there are three factors to boost the rapid growth of the track.
First, the downstream awareness of unmanned forklifts has risen. Forklift is one of the most commonly used industrial vehicles, unmanned forklift as the "intelligent unmanned" upgrade version of forklift, the downstream acceptance of its threshold, high awareness.
Second, there is a vast alternative space for unmanned forklifts.
According to GGII data, the current domestic penetration rate of unmanned forklifts is less than 2%, which is at an extremely low level, and every 1% replacement space means nearly 10,000 units of shipments. A number of industry insiders said that within 5 years, the penetration rate of unmanned forklifts is more reasonable to reach about 20%, which shows the great potential for its future development.
Third, with the maturity of technology and competition with multiple enterprises, unmanned forklifts have sharply reduced prices.
GGII data show that the average price of unmanned forklifts in 2017 was close to 550,000 yuan, and the average price dropped to 200,000 yuan (including the system) by 2022, greatly shortening the return on investment cycle for downstream customers to purchase unmanned forklifts.
07 Component core capability evolution
The core components in the mobile robot enterprise include: controller, servo motor and precision reducer.
In recent years, the localization of robot core parts has accelerated, the market share of domestic enterprises has been increasing, and the three core parts have made a greater breakthrough.
In 2023, in the face of the "stuck neck" problem, policies and enterprises are helping how to enter a new stage. For example, most of the relevant robot policies issued around the country emphasize the need to enhance the industrial basic capabilities of key parts and key technologies of robots. As mentioned in the "Several measures to promote the innovation and development of the robot industry in Beijing", it will continue to improve the six core components, including controllers and servo motors.
In terms of enterprises, many related parts and components companies said that they have increased the layout and investment in research and development funds and talents this year. At present, the core components are moving towards integration, integration, miniaturization and lightweight development. For example, the servo motor realizes the integration of drive and control, and highly integrates the "motor + driver + reducer + wheel", reducing the space occupied while maintaining the excellent characteristics of high response speed and high positioning accuracy.
08 The big giants cross the border into the game
Since the beginning of this year, Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, NetEase, Meituan and other technology giants have bet on the mobile robot circuit in both aspects of "investment + self-research".
Previously, Gaogong mobile robot has reported three ways for technology giants to enter the robot.
First, the cutting-edge class led by Microsoft and Google, the establishment of the research institute to focus on the field of robotics, compared with commercial landing robots, more interested in software algorithms and artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.
Second, the industrial manufacturing class led by Tesla, with its own manufacturing basis, clearly for the purpose of commercial landing, the robot will be sold as a product.
Third, the self-use category led by Amazon. Amazon is at the forefront of leading the mobile robot scene, with more than 750,000 robots currently deployed in its global warehouse and distribution network. The profit of such enterprises does not come from the sale of robots, but hopes to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of their main business through robots.
Cross-border new forces, whether they will stir up the mobile robot market, we will wait and see.
09 Cash flow challenges
Capital cooling, downstream demand cold environment, strict project payment mode, so that mobile robot companies cash flow is at risk.
In response to the severe problem of "difficult payment", Gaogong mobile robot has done an analysis, due to the contraction of demand in most downstream industries of mobile robots, orders are highly concentrated in a few tracks. Causing mobile robot companies to cluster to a few hot track.
Under the internal volume, it has also allowed large customers to occupy a dominant position, the price war has intensified, and strict payment methods have also emerged, such as "0091" and other payment models.
Due to harsh payment methods, integrators involved in mobile robot projects often need to provide capital, which aggravates the cash flow stability of mobile robots.
What mobile robots need to do more is to focus on the precipitation of their own advantageous industries, constantly optimize the hardware and software of robots, build their own moats, improve profitability, and pay attention to the development of the entire mobile robot industry. Maintaining sufficient cash flow may be the key to winning this "endurance race".
10 Cold chain logistics sword point 2024
In the cold storage scene of ice and fire, there is a rigid demand for mobile robots.
The first is the poor environment in the cold storage and the shortage of labor force, which promotes the increase in demand for "machine generation". In the cold storage environment, employees work for a long time, the damage is greater, and a large number of cold storage are facing the dilemma of worker shortage.
The mobile robot can not only help enterprises alleviate the pressure of labor shortage, reduce the harm of low temperature environment to employees, but also reduce the number of opening and closing of cold storage, reduce the energy consumption of cold storage, help enterprises release the manpower in the warehouse, and improve the efficiency, accuracy and intelligence of cold chain logistics.
For mobile robots, cold chain logistics also has a lot of demand to be released. Relevant data show that in the first half of 2023, the size of China's cold chain logistics market was 268.8 billion yuan, an increase of 3.3%. At present, there is still a large gap in cold storage capacity, and many first-tier cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and other cold storage are often in full rent or even out of stock, and resources are tight.
In 2021, the "14th Five-Year Plan" for the development of cold chain logistics clearly stipulates the short and medium term development goals of China's cold chain logistics industry. Today, local governments in 31 provinces and cities across the country have also introduced relevant support policies to encourage enterprises to invest in cold chain logistics.
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