Deloitte Report: China's industrial robot exports reached US$1.67 billion in 2025 and achieved a trade surplus for the first time

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Deloitte launched the “China Embodied Smart Industry Overseas Report”. Currently, the global physical intelligence industry is at a critical inflection point from technology verification to large-scale commercial implementation. The global market size will exceed 21 billion US dollars in 2025, and the market size is expected to exceed 100 billion US dollars by 2030. The market prospects are broad. The export scale of China's robot industry continues to expand, and its competitiveness in the global market continues to improve. In 2025, China's industrial robot exports reached 1.67 billion US dollars, achieving a trade surplus for the first time. Industrial robot exports reached a further $1.01 billion in the first half of 2026.

Guo Dajiang, partner at the Deloitte Asia Pacific Center of Excellence in Physics and Artificial Intelligence, said, “The global physical intelligence industry as a whole has entered a rapid growth cycle, and the pace of market expansion continues to accelerate. Relying on a huge domestic demand market, a complete policy system, an active capital market, a mature hardware supply chain, and leading engineering mass production capabilities, China has become the core force behind the global implementation of intelligent and large-scale implementation.”

Traditional industrial robots have established a mature export system, while new types of embodied robots, such as humanoid and quadruped, are still in the early stages of overseas verification. At the same time, overseas applications are shifting from scientific research to real business scenarios. Since 2025, overseas customers have gradually expanded from universities, scientific research institutions, etc. to industrial, commercial, and infrastructure enterprises, etc., and scenarios have also ranged from training and prototype display to verification into real business scenarios.

The report predicts that China's smart overseas expansion will present a stepped product upgrade path:

Short-term: Focus on highly deterministic industrial scenarios such as manufacturing and logistics;

Mid-term: Prioritize humanoid and four-legged robots to complete commercial verification in high purchasing power markets;

Long-term: The competitive focus is shifting to integrated solutions and operation and maintenance services, spawning innovative business models such as robot SaaS and RaaS.

Chen Weihao, Head of Overseas Services at Deloitte China Consulting Business, said, “Going overseas is not only an important opportunity for domestic smart enterprises to achieve large-scale epitaxial growth, but also a necessary path for the Chinese industry to seize technological dominance, lock in the core position of the industrial chain, and build a global brand. China's outbound intelligent robots present a new pattern of 'leading the scale of industrial robots and speeding up the launch of intelligent flexible category'.”

The vast overseas market space is driven by both supply and demand. Relying on a complete domestic industrial base, a mature and complete supply chain ecosystem, and full market-based competition, domestic enterprises have built up cost and price advantages; on the one hand, the demand side comes from labor shortages and rising labor costs in mature industrial economies such as Europe, America, Japan, and South Korea; on the other hand, it stems from the rigid upgrading needs of manufacturing digitalization and automation transformation in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and other regions.

For key overseas markets, the report proposes differentiated layout ideas:

Mature markets (Europe, Japan, etc.): Adopt deep cultivation strategies to establish brand highland and obtain high-value orders;

Incremental markets (Vietnam, Thailand, etc.): Relying on “following manufacturing migration+system integration cooperation” to achieve large-scale replication;

Potential markets (Middle East, etc.): Establishing regional influence through benchmark projects.

Chen Weihao mentioned that the next three years will be a critical window for Chinese smart enterprises to go overseas. Enterprises need to comprehensively evaluate market potential, the degree of difficulty of entry matches their own capabilities, and formulate differentiated market entry strategies.