19/11/2019 - News, Publications
IFR World Robotics Report: optimistic fugures for 2019 robot installations and sells
Reading time: 1 minutePreliminary statistics from the World Robotics Report confirm a new record of globally installed robotic units in 2018 - a 6% increase over the previous year.
Between April and September 2019, the International Federation of Robotics (https://ifr.org/) released data on sales and installations of robots worldwide, classified by industrial robots and service robots, which in turn are divided into professional and personal robots.
Despite the international economic crisis - and perhaps also in line with this, as we will see - the data from the IFR confirm an increase in sales of robots in all sectors. The installation of industrial robots has grown by 6%.
The five main markets for industrial robots are China, Japan, Japan, the United States, the Republic of Korea and Germany. These countries represent 74% of the world's robotic installations. China remains the main user of industrial robots, with a decline in 2019 due to the decrease in global growth. Industrial robots are used in the automotive sector, electronics and metalworking. Collaborative robots, the cobots, still represent a niche for installation and sales: these, in fact, need a reorganization of the work process and staff training. So, of investments. In fact, from the point of view of investment, companies consider it less expensive to replace human personnel with robots rather than training a significant number of human workers to use collaborative robots and completely reorganize production, thus increasing the quality and sustainability of products (saving energy, materials, reducing waste, etc.).
Sales of service robots for professional use have also increased by 32%. Logistics systems such as self-driven vehicles (AGVs) account for the majority of the professional robot market1 (41% of all units sold). The second category is inspection and maintenance robots (39% of all units sold). These two segments account for 80% of the total market share. Drones sales have also increased significantly.
The best-selling personal and household service robots are household robots, which include cleaning robots and lawnmowers. The value has increased by 15%. The IFR outlook predicts a sharp increase in sales of professional and personal robots (2019-2022).
Vacuuming robots will increasingly enter homes around the world. It is estimated that more than 17.6 million units of domestic robots - including lawnmowers, pool cleaners, and vacuum cleaners - will be sold by 2019. Sales of units are expected to increase by an average of 46% per year so that more than 55 million units will be sold by 2022.
Sales of medical robots have increased by 50% to 5,100 units. Medical robots account for 31% of the total sales value of professional service robots.
IFR World Robotics Report, summary: https://ifr.org/free-downloads/