China's Robotic Industry Retains Global Edge
By Staff Reporters
The 2025 World Robot Conference, held from August 8 to 12 in Beijing, showcased more than 1,500 exhibits from over 200 domestic and foreign robot enterprises. Since the first conference was held in 2015, China's robot industry has achieved a series of major breakthroughs.
In 2024, China's sales volume of industrial robots reached 302,000 units, remaining the world's largest industrial robot market for 12 consecutive years.
Meanwhile, as the world's largest producer of robots, China's output of industrial robots soared from 33,000 units in 2015 to 556,000 units in 2024. In the first half of 2025, that output reached 369,300 units, up 35.6 percent year on year. The output of service robots exceeded 10.5 million units, representing a year-on-year growth of 34.3 percent.
Advancements have been made in robot technological innovation. In this field, the number of China's patent applications accounted for two-thirds of the global total in 2024, and the number of valid patents exceeded 190,000.
Core technologies such as large robot models, intelligent collaborative control, and human-computer interaction have been continuously improved. In the field of humanoid robots, emotional interaction and complex movements have been achieved.
In application scenarios, industrial robots have been applied in 71 major industry categories and 236 medium industry categories of the national economy. The density of China's manufacturing robots has risen to the third place globally.
In the service sector, robots are more widely used in fields such as household services, warehousing and logistics, commercial services, elderly care and disability assistance, and medical rehabilitation.
In addition, China's robots perform well in the global market. In 2024, Chinese manufacturers dominated the global commercial service robot market, with a shipment share of 84.7 percent. According to China's General Administration of Customs, the country exported 94,200 industrial robots in the first half of this year, with a total value of 746 million USD, an increase of nearly 60 percent year on year.
