A few years ago, autonomous mobile robots and collaborative robotic arms were among the hottest sectors in automation.
Universal Robots and Geek+ rode the wave of early demand, turning once-niche ideas into billion-dollar businesses.
But now, the landscape looks very different. With dozens of new competitors offering similar machines, prices are under pressure, growth has slowed, and the market is showing all the classic signs of saturation.
The story of AMRs and cobots is a familiar one across many industries: rapid innovation draws investment, new entrants flood in, and before long, competition becomes overwhelming.
What happens next – and which companies survive – depends less on hard work or clever marketing than on proven, data-backed strategies.
This article examines what research shows about thriving in saturated markets, drawing on lessons from robotics and other sectors to identify which tactics – from servitization to niche specialization – actually work when everyone is fighting for the same customers.
When fast growth meets too many players
The market for collaborative robots and autonomous mobile robots grew explosively through the 2010s and early 2020s. Universal Robots (UR) and Geek+ were among the standout success stories – both credited with turning niche technologies into global categories.
UR, part of Teradyne, helped make cobots mainstream by offering safe, lightweight arms that small manufacturers could deploy without specialist programming. Between 2015 and 2022, its sales more than tripled.
Geek+, meanwhile, became one of the most widely adopted warehouse automation providers in the world, installing thousands of robots at logistics sites from Europe to Asia.
But the speed of growth inevitably attracted a wave of new entrants. Today, the cobot field includes competitors such as Doosan Robotics, Techman, Fanuc, and Hanwha, while the AMR sector is crowded with companies like Locus Robotics, GreyOrange, Hikrobot, and MiR.
Most offer similar features – mobile navigation, collaborative safety, and cloud fleet management – and all are fighting for the same customers.
Recent data shows how competition is reshaping the market. Analysts calculate that global cobot shipments grew by around 10-15 percent in 2024 – down from the dramatic surges of previous years – while average selling prices fell.
AMR suppliers are experiencing similar dynamics, with warehouse deployments levelling off in North America and China after a decade of expansion.
Universal Robots reported $293 million in revenue in 2024, a modest increase that contrasts sharply with its earlier growth trajectory. Geek+ announced half-year revenue of RMB 1.025 billion for 2025 – still rising, but below the pace that once made it an industry phenomenon.
Both remain market leaders, yet they now operate in an environment where margins are thinner, buyers are more cautious, and rivals can replicate designs faster than ever.
This is the textbook pattern of a mature market: technological diffusion has outpaced differentiation. In economic terms, the supply curve has raced ahead of demand. In practical terms, companies are competing not just to grow — but to survive.
What actually works in saturated markets
When competition becomes relentless, slogans like “work harder” or “innovate more” offer little guidance. The question is not whether companies should respond, but how – and which responses have been proven to work.
Studies across industries, from automotive to consumer electronics, show several strategies that consistently correlate with survival and superior profitability in crowded markets.
A) Servitization: turning products into ongoing relationships
Research from multiple manufacturing sectors shows that companies which evolve from selling standalone products to offering services and outcomes can achieve higher long-term margins and customer retention. This shift – known as servitization – transforms capital equipment into a performance-based service model.
In robotics, this is taking shape through Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS). Instead of selling units outright, companies such as Locus Robotics, Fetch (now Zebra), and MiR increasingly offer subscription models that charge by task, hour, or throughput.
This stabilises revenue, deepens customer integration, and raises switching costs – critical advantages when hardware margins collapse.
A 2023 review in the International Journal of Production Economics found that servitized manufacturers outperform pure product sellers when they align their service offering with customer value metrics rather than maintenance alone. In other words: tying revenue to customer success, not machine uptime, is what drives resilience.
B) Experience curves and scale: learning faster than the competition
Economists have observed for nearly a century that each doubling of cumulative production tends to reduce unit cost by a predictable percentage – a phenomenon called the experience curve. It’s why market leaders often get stronger as markets mature: they can lower prices without destroying margins.
In robotics, scale translates directly into data – and therefore into better performance. Every additional cobot or AMR deployed feeds real-world data into vision systems, grasping algorithms, and navigation models.
Universal Robots benefits from this network effect: its millions of hours of logged operation inform software updates that smaller rivals cannot match. Similarly, Geek+ trains its fleet management AI across thousands of robots in live warehouses, improving traffic flow and reliability.
The lesson is not just about size, but about learning. Companies that compound operational knowledge faster than their competitors accumulate both cost advantage and product maturity – a double barrier to entry.
C) Differentiation: when doing one thing better still pays
Michael Porter’s classic framework remains empirically relevant: firms that differentiate clearly tend to outperform those “stuck in the middle.” Differentiation in a saturated robotics market doesn’t necessarily mean radical technology; it means focusing where others don’t.
UR has leaned into application ecosystems – welding, palletizing, machine tending – rather than chasing ever-larger payloads. Each application comes with pre-validated kits, simplifying deployment for system integrators. Doosan Robotics has taken a similar route in food and beverage automation, an underserved niche.
This focus-driven differentiation allows premium pricing and brand authority even in commodity-heavy markets. It’s a statistical regularity in mature industries: firms that anchor themselves in specific customer outcomes sustain higher returns than those competing on feature checklists.
D) Resource partitioning: specialists can thrive beside giants
Sociological studies of crowded markets – most famously in the US brewing industry – show that as industries mature, space opens for specialist firms that cater to well-defined niches. Known as resource partitioning, this pattern applies neatly to robotics.
For example, Rokae and Precise Automation focus on ultra-clean, high-precision assembly in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, while Bionik Laboratories specialises in medical rehabilitation robots.
Their scale is small, but their defensibility is high. As mass-market players chase volume, specialists win by focusing on identity, expertise, and deep customer intimacy.
E) Pricing discipline: avoiding the race to the bottom
A 2022 study of online markets in Management Science confirmed what many manufacturers learn the hard way: price wars destroy value even for low-cost leaders. The winners are companies that create pricing architecture – bundles, service tiers, software licensing, or subscription layers – rather than cutting prices indiscriminately.
In robotics, that translates into integrated packages (hardware + software + analytics), multi-year service contracts, and value-based pricing around throughput or labour savings. Customers gain clarity on ROI; vendors maintain margin stability.
This is the difference between selling robots and selling productivity. The former can be copied. The latter can’t.
Choose survival
Each of these strategies – servitization, learning advantage, differentiation, specialization, and pricing discipline – has empirical backing from studies of mature industries.
Together, they point toward one principle: in a saturated market, survival isn’t about out-inventing everyone; it’s about out-positioning them.
Lessons from those who stay ahead
Saturated markets don’t eliminate winners – they simply narrow the field to companies that adapt strategically rather than emotionally.
The record across industries, including robotics, shows that leaders who survive these cycles share a few recurring traits: disciplined focus, service integration, and patient investment in learning.
Universal Robots: making scale personal
UR remains the most recognised name in collaborative robotics, but its dominance no longer rests on hardware volume alone. Instead, the company has quietly repositioned itself as a platform provider – nurturing an ecosystem of partners who build application kits and accessories.
By 2025, more than half of all UR cobots were sold with pre-integrated software and tooling bundles. That shift transformed UR from a component manufacturer into an enabler of turnkey automation, reducing deployment complexity for customers.
It also stabilised revenue through training, support, and upgrade services – a textbook case of servitization and differentiation working together.
While its year-on-year revenue growth has slowed, UR’s operating margins remain among the highest in the cobot sector. Scale, ecosystem learning, and recurring income have combined to protect it from the price erosion affecting smaller entrants.
Geek+: scaling smarter, not faster
In warehouse automation, Geek+ faced the same dilemma: rapid success bred dozens of imitators. Rather than chasing sheer unit volume, it focused on repeatability and software leverage.
Geek+’s orchestration platform – which manages heterogeneous robot fleets across global logistics sites – now contributes a growing share of its profit. That software layer turns each physical installation into a data node, improving fleet performance and customer retention.
This is the experience-curve principle applied digitally: each warehouse teaches the system to run the next one better. Competitors can copy the machines, but not the cumulative learning embedded in the code.
Beyond robotics: How other industries survived saturation
The pattern repeats far beyond automation.
- Apple faced smartphone saturation by pivoting from hardware margins to services revenue – iCloud, Music, and App Store subscriptions now exceed $100 billion annually.
- Toyota retained profitability through decades of automotive glut by mastering lean production – compressing the learning curve faster than competitors.
- Microbreweries in the US illustrate resource partitioning: small firms thrive by marketing authenticity and local identity rather than scale.
Across sectors, the lesson is identical: long-term winners manage value creation and capture simultaneously. They don’t merely innovate; they institutionalise learning and customer attachment.
The saturation cycle never ends – but it can be mastered
Every fast-growing market eventually slows. AMRs and cobots are simply entering the same maturity phase that every industrial technology faces once adoption crosses the early threshold. But as Universal Robots and Geek+ show, slowing growth need not mean decline.
The companies that endure treat saturation as feedback, not failure. They shift from expansion to optimisation – investing in services, software, and customer proximity. They become less dependent on selling units and more reliant on selling outcomes.
For robotics firms now navigating this crowded landscape, the question is not how to escape competition, but how to design businesses that profit from it. Those who do will define the next phase of the industry – not by how many robots they ship, but by how intelligently they use them to build enduring value.
