China’s robotics industry outlook remains positive post-Covid-19 outbreak, especially across manufacturing, hospitality, and healthcare sectors.
This is according to a new report, How is Covid-19 Shaping China’s Robotics Industry?, by YCP Solidiance, which highlights that the $8 billion robotics industry projects a positive long-term growth forecast highlighting robotic automation and its useful applications across different industries.
Investment Contraction in China Following Covid-19: The Covid-19 outbreak has caused investment contraction in Q1 2020 – between 50 percent to 57 percent year-on-year, setting off a difficult funding situation across China and globally.
Although the number of deals and deal volume declined, overall investment climate is expected pick up for the remainder of 2020 and onwards.
Overview of the Robotic Segments: Industrial robotics help automating factory assembly lines, with China accounting for 36 percent of global new installations.
Service robotics holds the largest market share among all segments with $2.2 billion market share in 2019, 33 percent higher than previous year.
The “special service” robotics segment, including drones and hazard rescue robots, is expected to hit $910 million market share in 2020 and expands at steady rates moving forward.
Covid-19 impacts and trends on China’s robotics
China’s robotics industry has been benefiting both in the pandemic stricken short-term and long-term, with key trends as follows.
- Industrial robotics trend: Short-term demand dampened by factories’ tight cash flows, but positive growth in long-term
- Although it has been negatively impacted by Covid-19, this segment will gain more appetite for automation as the business climate warms, exceeding its compound annual growth rate of 21 percent between 2014-2019.
- Service and special service robots: Positive growth due to continued effort for minimizing human contact and increased efficiency
An increase of service robots and drones in public areas is very much expected for monitoring the crowd size, taking temperatures, or even as robotic waiters and deliverers.
YCP Solidiance says robotic solutions, online collaboration tools, and tracking and detection systems will stay due to increasing awareness of hygiene, contributing to improve all aspects across multiple industries.
YCP Solidiance also suggests “key learning” for manufacturing, healthcare and hospitality sectors.
Start-ups today should leverage the Covid-19 pandemic as an accelerator of change.
To capitalize on potential opportunities under the pandemic-stricken business environment, start-ups can adopt three crucial strategies below:
- to be customer-centric in identifying new revenue streams and capturing them with existing resources;
- sensitive to co-creation opportunities with other companies; and
- be socially responsible.
