IFR weighs in on China’s five-year plan for robotics

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On the finish of 2021, China introduced its latest five-year plan for robotics, created by the nation’s Ministry of Business and Info Know-how. The overarching objective of the plan is to make China a key supply of world robotics innovation.

By 2025, the nation plans the typical annual development fee of working revenue within the robotics business will exceed 20%. The five-year plan set out targets to develop depth and breadth of robotic purposes to proceed to develop the variety of robots within the nation. It additionally hopes to advertise a stronger and extra steady supply-chain and to higher standardize the business.

“China launched the second five-year improvement plan for the robotics business – following 2016-2020,” Music Xiaogang, govt director and secretary-general of the China Robotic Business Alliance (CRIA), mentioned. “The plan has nice guiding significance for selling the high-quality improvement of China’s robotics business throughout the 14th interval. Robots are the important thing gear of recent business. The brand new 5-year plan leads the digital improvement and clever upgrading in China and likewise helps to advertise the worldwide robotic expertise progress.”

The Worldwide Federation of Robotics (IFR), a non-profit group with the objective of selling analysis, improvement, use and worldwide cooperation in robotics, gave perception on China’s present place on the earth market and the importance of the plan.

“China is by far the largest robotic market on the earth relating to annual gross sales and the operational inventory,” Milton Guerry, president of the IFR, mentioned. “IFR’s robotic density statistics is a helpful indicator of China’s dynamic developments, counting the variety of industrial robots per 10,000 staff: China’s robotic density within the manufacturing business at the moment ranks ninth globally (246 items) – in comparison with twenty fifth (49 items) simply 5 years in the past.”

Whereas China has been quickly growing the variety of robots at work within the nation, lots of these robots nonetheless come from overseas suppliers, notably from Japan, South Korea and Europe. In 2020, overseas producers had a mixed share of the Chinese language robotics market of 73%.

Installations of robots in China by Chinese language and overseas suppliers. | Supply: World Robotics 2021

The variety of robotic installations by home corporations is rising. In 2020, 45,347 items have been put in by home corporations. Nonetheless, the variety of overseas installations can also be rising. In 2020, it grew by 24% to 123,030 items.

Total, there have been 20% extra robots put in in China in 2020 than in 2019.