Robohub.org
 

What’s happening to the big industrial robot stocks?


by
02 June 2012



share this:

… Compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is back to where it started the year, the big four robot manufacturers are down 20% year to date. Yet 2011 robot sales were great (see story below). And prospects for 2012 sales were expected to be just as good. Particularly in Asia. So why are these stocks 20% down?
… Rising wages and demands for faster, safer production are driving Chinese manufacturers to buy more robots. China bought 15,000 robots last year and expects that figure to expand 30-40% annually.
… KUKA, the largest European industrial robot maker, is building a regional hub in China.
… FANUC tripled production capacity to handle new sales into China. It’s stock is the only one of the four that is positive for the year.
… YASKAWA ELECTRIC is building plants in Japan and China to meet the rising demand.
… ABB, the second-largest European robot maker, said that it sells one out of three robots to customers in Asia, and just shipped it’s 200,000th robot to a solar manufacturer in China.
… Nevertheless, stocks of the Big 4 are significantly trailing the Dow Jones Industrial Average.



tags:


Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report, and is also a panel member for Robohub's Robotics by Invitation series.
Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report, and is also a panel member for Robohub's Robotics by Invitation series.





Related posts :



Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model

  11 Sep 2025
EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus today, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model.

Robots to the rescue: miniature robots offer new hope for search and rescue operations

  09 Sep 2025
Small two-wheeled robots, equipped with high-tech sensors, will help to find survivors faster in the aftermath of disasters.

#IJCAI2025 distinguished paper: Combining MORL with restraining bolts to learn normative behaviour

and   04 Sep 2025
The authors introduce a framework for guiding reinforcement learning agents to comply with social, legal, and ethical norms.

Researchers are teaching robots to walk on Mars from the sand of New Mexico

  02 Sep 2025
Researchers are closer to equipping a dog-like robot to conduct science on the surface of Mars

Engineering fantasy into reality

  26 Aug 2025
PhD student Erik Ballesteros is building “Doc Ock” arms for future astronauts.

RoboCup@Work League: Interview with Christoph Steup

and   22 Aug 2025
Find out more about the RoboCup League focussed on industrial production systems.

Interview with Haimin Hu: Game-theoretic integration of safety, interaction and learning for human-centered autonomy

and   21 Aug 2025
Hear from Haimin in the latest in our series featuring the 2025 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants.

AIhub coffee corner: Agentic AI

  15 Aug 2025
The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation.



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence