Customer service hotline:
Mobile phone version
Two-dimensional code
Shen Shi-rong, chief executive of New Kinpo Group, a unit of Taiwan's Kinpo Group, the world's third-largest OEM, plans to use more robots in his factories in Dongguan and elsewhere. Not only that, the company's robot production line in Dongguan is now in mass production.
It's hard to count how many companies are doing this - from buyers of robots to suppliers, this "crossover" lays bare the industry's fervor. In 2015, four to five robot companies were born every week, which is the Chinese speed of this industry. Last year's figure was two a week. China has been the world's largest robot market for two consecutive years. Comparable, perhaps only a few years ago the photovoltaic industry. This may explain why Beijing was chosen for the World Robot Conference in late November. But during the meeting, the optimism was mixed with a note of concern. Zhou Algebra, a senior investor, poured a little cold water, he said that it is necessary to be wary of copying the old road of photovoltaic in the field of robots - the photovoltaic industry after a large-scale investment boom, overcapacity and other contradictions intensified, fell into the brink of collapse, and a number of enterprises fell in the seemingly most brilliant moment. The question comes, is now the node of China's robot investment?
Flock into
On Nov. 6, Yu Zhichen, 30, was invited by his former boss to the launch of TuringOS, the second generation of Turing robots, an artificial intelligence-level robotic operating system. Afterwards, the boss sent a wechat circle of friends, saying, "Once you said you were going to do something, I didn't take it seriously, I didn't think you were really close to your dream."
In 2008, Yu Zhichen just resigned from Zhongsoft company to start a business. Although he entered the Artificial Intelligence Club of Beijing Jiaotong University in his freshman year and studied artificial intelligence under Professor He Zhongxiong, his entrepreneurial direction was wireless Internet. "I thought that wireless Internet and robotics were the two directions with the most room for development, but there was no market application for robots at that time, and it was very difficult to make the whole thing." 'he said.
At that time, the domestic AI started early enterprise small I robot is in the throes of transformation, "After two years of brilliance from 2004 to 2006, we entered the most difficult period from 2006 to 2009, but in the end, small I smoothly switched from the 'burning money' mode for C-end users to the 'making money' mode for B-end government and enterprise users." "We have discovered the first gold in the application of smart robots." Small I robot founding partner, company president Zhu Pin pin said.
In hindsight, 2008 turned out to be a pivotal year for China's robotics industry. In addition to artificial intelligence, the domestic industrial robot market was also in a gestation period that year. At that time, almost all factories in the entire electronics manufacturing industry were assembled by manual labor, few automation, robots have not even been heard of, after 2008, labor costs continue to rise, and foreign companies in electronics manufacturing have moved their factories to Southeast Asia and other places.
The demographic dividend of manufacturing in China has faded in the past 30 years, which in turn has forced the application of industrial robots. Japan is under the pressure of labor shortage in the mid-1980s, when China officially began to start, after more than ten years of development, has become a "robot kingdom", and once exported practical robots to the United States, where robots were born.
In the view of Ding Xilun, a well-known domestic space robotics expert, another key factor forcing the expansion of the application of China's robot industry is that due to the new generation of labor after 80 and 90, the concept has changed radically, and is no longer satisfied with selling simple and boring labor to survive, but the pursuit of higher levels of labor value and high quality of living standards. This has also caused the "labor shortage" of low-end manufacturing industry in recent years.
Data show that since 2008, the sales of domestic industrial robots have continued to grow rapidly, especially to 2013, 2014, China for two consecutive years on the world's first sales throne. IFR predicts that in 2017, China's industrial robot sales will reach about 100,000 units, accounting for about 35% of the global market share of home service robots in the future market space is even larger.
China is becoming the main battlefield for the global robot race. The boss of a foreign robot company is "very optimistic about the Chinese market" and declared that "he intends to move his family to Shanghai, China, for a long time." In fact, Yaskawa, Fanuc, Kawasaki, Nabotsk and other Japanese robot manufacturers, Hyundai, Roproda, Alpa and other Korean robot manufacturers, as well as Swiss ABB, German Kuka, Italy Comau and other European robot manufacturers, have come to China to set up subsidiaries or joint ventures, and in many Chinese cities to build factories or production bases. ABB has placed its global robot business headquarters and one of its two production bases in Shanghai.
Behind this, it can even be said that there is a national strategy battle. The US robotics technology roadmap, the EU "Spark" program, the German Industry 4.0 program, the Japanese Robotics White paper... In China, in 2012, the Ministry of Science and Technology issued the "Twelfth Five-Year" special plan for the development of service robot science and technology, and at the end of 2013, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the development of industrial robot industry", the relevant leaders of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology revealed at the World Robot Congress. The upcoming "13th Five-Year" development plan for the robot industry will, together with the "Made in China 2025" key areas of technology roadmap, constitute the development blueprint of China's robot industry. By the end of the "13th Five-Year Plan", the output value of China's robot industry cluster is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan.
Local governments are not far behind. According to incomplete statistics, there have been Zhejiang, Chongqing, Luoyang, Guangzhou, Dongguan, Foshan, Shunde and other local governments issued robot-related support policies. Luoyang headquarters moved to the local robot enterprises the maximum reward amount of 10 million yuan.
For China, this is a young contest. Yu Zhichen, who focuses on artificial intelligence, was born in 1984, and coincidentally, China's 863 program, released in 1985, first mentioned the direction of intelligent robots. Accounting for 70% of the world's drone consumer market, the market value of more than 8 billion US dollars of DJI innovation founder Jiang Tao is also a post-80, this year just 35 years old Jiang Tao in 2006 in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology dormitory to create DJI, then only 26 years old.
From the perspective of age, Qu Daokui, the founder of Siasun Robot, and Deng Xijun, the founder of Boshi Shares, are over 50 years old, and they are all scientists who have turned to become entrepreneurs. But their businesses are also young. Siasun Robot was founded in 2001, and the current market value is 58.956 billion yuan. Founded in 1997 and successfully listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2012, Boshi is A large intelligent equipment supplier. This group of young people and young businesses has led to another "cross-border" force.
Secret worry
In 2012, Zhou Dai, who has been studying the field of robotics, felt that the robot heat was obviously heating up, and he began to try to invest in robot projects. What made him entangled was that many robot projects did not even have factories or fixed assets, and the good and bad were mixed. In the selection and investment process, it was necessary to carefully investigate the enterprise in terms of talent, technology, team, market, strategy, etc. To make a decision. In the end, he found a small and micro enterprise of upstream core parts from a long time of research, "the company team has a total of 12 people, and 8 are doing technology research and development," and other industries see the business model is different, Zhou Dai regards technology as a necessary and insufficient condition for robot investment.
He seems to be right, "now that company is sprinting to the New third board," but Zhou Dai, a veteran robot investor who is deputy secretary general of the 50-person Forum on China's multi-level capital markets, also sees risks. According to Zhoudai statistics, as of now, there are about 88 listed on the main board, small and medium-sized board and GEM board with robots as the main business, among which robots are the main business enterprises and the way to get involved in the field of robots through mergers and acquisitions. Other data show that as of now, there are about 3,000 robot-related enterprises in China, and the rate of "two robot enterprises per week last year" has become "four or five enterprises per week". At the same time, more than 30 robot industrial parks have emerged across the country in recent years.
Zhou Dai said that it is necessary to be wary of the old way of copying photovoltaic in the robot field. From 2008 to 2011, the photovoltaic industry was hot, and by 2012, more than 300 photovoltaic industrial parks were built around the country. But the risks are starting to spread. In 2013, once went to the United States to let the founder Shi Zhengrong with 18.6 billion yuan worth to become the "richest man in China" that year, one of the "photovoltaic duo" Sunde Power into the bankruptcy reorganization process, coincidentally, LDK Jiangxi has also fallen into the crisis of resolving nearly 30 billion yuan of debt, until recently came the news of bankruptcy reorganization process.
In Ding Xilun's eyes, the bubble in the domestic robot industry has been very serious, and the phenomenon of low-end repeated homogenization of construction has become more and more prominent, "many investors live by deception."
What do practitioners think? On Dec. 3, sitting in his office at the Silicon Valley Liangcheng Science Park in Zhongguancun, Haidian District, Yu Zhicchen, the founder and chairman of Beijing Light Year Infinity Co., Ltd. said that some bubbles in the fast-growing robot industry are normal, similar to the previous Internet industry. "The core of the robot industry, especially the virtual robot industry, is technological innovation, and it needs long-term accumulation, the threshold is high, and there is almost no smooth doing this line, because there is a long-term sustained investment, which has been accumulated before," Yu Zhichen said.
On the one hand, all kinds of robot investors in China have entered and mixed, but on the other hand, the core component technology of domestic industrial robots has been subject to the reality of people. In the fast-growing Chinese industrial robot consumer market, 65% of the share was swallowed by the world's four major robot giants last year, while domestic robots accounted for only about 10%. "At present, the overall gap between domestic robot technology and the international advanced level is very large, only a few points can reach the international advanced level, such as the Jiaolong deep-sea robot, robot mechanism design and other aspects are relatively advanced," Ding Xilun said, "However, our country lags behind a lot in the technical level of industrial robots, service robots, medical robots and so on." It is not only the low level of manufacturing technology for the key parts of the robot, such as the motor and the reducer, but also for other reasons."
Qu Dao-kui, a scientist turned president of Siasun Robotics, an industry leader, has recently put forward a risk warning to China's robot industry more than once, and he mentioned again a few days ago that technology hollowing out, low-end application and market marginalization are the three major potential risks in the current industry.
direction
"Although the technology currently lags behind the international advanced level, China still has opportunities," Ding Xilun believes that the French government's support strategy for the field of robotics may be worth learning from China at this time, such as the government to organize some basic robot technology research projects, while the industry to support the application and development of work, the two complement each other, so that robots in the French business community quickly develop and popularize. That is, through research programs strongly supported by the government, a complete scientific and technological system has been established.
Ding Xilun's point of view is that the government can guide but not dominate, and mature technologies like robots can completely let the market lead. "The scale of China's manufacturing industry is very large, driven by 'machine replacement', the market space will be large in a certain period of time, and Chinese enterprises have made breakthroughs in integrated innovation, which is also a direction."
The current logic of Zhu Frequent is that in 2015, the market has a strong demand for physical robots, according to the characteristics of the enterprise and the external environment, the small I robot from soft to hard is not only the strategic planning of the enterprise, but also a process of natural and benign development of technology, products and industries.
Perhaps no one knows what the future holds, and that may be where the opportunity lies. "Robots include perception system, control system, cognitive system three parts, and the perception and control system can have multiple, and known as the robot's 'brain' cognitive system, that is, artificial intelligence system only one, far higher than the Internet field of technical barriers, the future may appear all robots have only one 'brain' situation," "There is still a great opportunity for China to seize the commanding heights in this regard," Mr. Yu said.
