From spectacle to scale: why China’s robotics firms face a ‘critical juncture’

China’s robots have won global attention with a string of viral stunts. But firms now face growing pressure to generate real-world returns

At China’s annual World Robot Conference (WRC) that kicked off on Wednesday, the hall was filled with humanoid robots wowing visitors with feats of dexterity: from playing table tennis to performing drum solos.

These eye-catching displays have helped China’s robotics industry win global attention – and raise huge amounts of capital – over the past couple of years. But at this year’s summit, the overriding sentiment among executives, investors and policymakers was starkly pragmatic: the era of viral parlour tricks is over.

Across the industry, the race is now on to make the leap from small-scale trials to large-scale deployment, as firms come under pressure to generate real-world returns. Xu Xiaolan, president of the Chinese Institute of Electronics and a former vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said on Wednesday that the embodied intelligence industry was at a “critical juncture”.

“The core goal over the past two years has been to push applications into the real world,” Xu said, pointing to emerging uses in public services, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and emergency response.

The shift to mass production will also transform competition in the industry, with firms needing to deliver robots that offer “reliability, autonomy and economic value in real operating environments rather than locomotion performance alone”, Morgan Stanley said in a report published ahead of the conference.