If you walk through a modern warehouse or factory today, you already see the transition. A few years ago, most people still imagined robots as expensive arms in cages, reserved for automotive giants and showpiece sites. Everyone else kept throwing people at the problem and accepted long walks, heavy lifting and error-prone processes as the cost of doing business.

That picture is now out of date. The installed base of industrial robots worldwide reached roughly 4.66 million units in 2024, up about 9% year-on-year, with annual installations above 500,000 for the fourth year in a row. China alone accounts for around half of recent installations and now supplies almost half of its own domestic robot market. The message is clear: the hardware volume game is being played, and China is very good at it.

In Europe, we see a different strength emerging. If you look at companies like Exotec, which I met seven or eight years ago and have watched grow, the magic is not one robot; it is the full system, racking, mobile units, software, safety, service. They have deployed more than 10,000 Skypod robots and eliminated tens of millions of kilometres of walking for warehouse workers. On the other side, Chinese players like Geek+ have put over 30,000 mobile robots into the world, including thousands in Europe. When you talk to operators, they are not asking for humanoids; they are asking for predictable throughput, fast payback and a solution that can live in a brownfield site without shutting the warehouse for six months.

The strategic question for Europe is not “will robots come?”, they are already here. The real question is: who designs the systems, the standards and the software that make a mixed fleet of European, Chinese and American machines safe, efficient and financeable?