Kuka plans for robot domination in China and your garage

German industrial giant Kuka is the world’s largest producer of robots used to make automobiles, with its signature orange crane-like bots a fixture in automated car factories across the globe. So why is Chairman and Chief Executive Till Reuter worried?

The reason is simple enough: Growth in robots for all industries other than automotive is up more than 10 percent; that compares to just 3-5 percent for the car industry, he says. Kuka’s auto business has fallen from 80 percent of robot revenues, when he took over the company in 2009, to around 50 percent today, Reuter notes.  Now this 120-year-old company, which in January became just under 95 percent-owned by China’s Midea, the world’s largest appliance maker, is aiming to pull off a big transformation that, if successful, will take it into faster-growing robot markets.

That means smaller-sized and nimble robots for electronics manufacturing and logistics warehouses. Also on the drawing board are machines that could handle plugging in electric vehicles for owners, or even allow the elderly to live independently at home later in life, Reuter said in an interview in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou earlier this month.

“We want to keep number one in automotive [but] we see that the higher growth is coming out of other industries and other sectors.” For example, one large market that will become “even bigger in the future, will be the production of mobile phones, handhelds, and iPads,” he says. Reuter is referring to robots that have a payload of six kilograms or less — the maximum weight they can pick up and manipulate — and are capable of carrying out much more delicate assembly tasks.

China will be key to realising Kuka’s diversification strategy.  It’s the world’s largest and fastest-growing automation market. Sales of robots in China, which amount to about one-third of the global demand, grew by 27 percent last year, compared to just 12 percent in Europe and 8 percent in the Americas, according to the International Federation of Robotics.