From SemiAnalysis, March 11:
China's Dominance Playbook, General Purpose Robotics Is The Holy Grail, Robotic Systems Breakdown, Supply Chain Hardships, The West Is Positioned Backward And Covering Their Eyes, China's Clear Path to Full Scale Automation, Call For Action
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This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities.
This is the manufacturing playing field that China has dominated for years now. The country has one of the most competitive economies in the world internally, where they will naturally achieve economies of scale and have shown themselves to be one of most skilled in high-volume manufacturing, at the same time their engineering quality has grown to be competitive in several critical industries at the highest level. This has already happened in batteries, solar, and is well underway in EVs. With these economies of scale, they are able to supply large developing markets, like Southeast Asia, Latin America, and others, allowing them to extend their advantage and influence.
The impact of this in robotics will be exponential compared to their last strategic industry captures. These will be robotics systems manufacturing more robotics systems, and with each unit produced the cost will be driven down continuously and the quality will improve, only strengthening their production flywheel. This will repeat ad infinitum and as quality inevitably increases it will make it extraordinarily difficult for other countries to compete. Due to the fact that robotics is a general purpose technology, this will have horizontal impacts on all manufacturing sectors and all other currently advantaged industries as well–textiles, electronics, consumer goods, etc. At the moment, the West is caught flatfooted: South Korea and Japan have a birth rate crisis that is throttling their manufacturing capabilities, European industrial sectors are being eaten alive by China and their inability to generate power, and the US is focused on other markets and procuring cheap overseas production, all the while China’s manufacturing capacity has gotten stronger and robotics is catching fire.
Source: SemiAnalysis, IFR.org.
China’s robotics localization effort is well underway. Local firms are taking over the world’s largest market, approaching a 50% market share, compared to just 30% in 2020. While Chinese manufacturers are currently on par with Western giants in the low-end market, our supply chain review leads us to believe that local firms are beginning to take over the higher-end market segments. The rise of Unitree exemplifies this shift: the only viable humanoid robot on the market, the Unitree G1, is now entirely decoupled from American components.
Source: SemiAnalysis, IFR.org.
Today, building an identical robot arm (modeled after the Universal Robots UR5e) in the US is ~2.2x more expensive than in China. Under the hood, the situation is even more alarming. Even if those components are labeled “Made in USA”, they rely heavily upon China-made parts and materials – with no viable scalable alternative.
Source: SemiAnalysis
Drones, DJI, GoPro, and How Iteration Speed Paves Victory’s Path
The commercial drone market exemplifies China’s scale/oversupply playbook in every strategic industry it has entered, however, this is the first example of the strategy in a robotics-adjacent market. Local leader DJI today accounts for over 80% of the global commercial drone market… and 90% in the American consumer market! While the company was a first-mover, it maintained and consolidated its market position for over a decade thanks to China’s manufacturing dominance and economies of scale/oversupply strategy.
Source: SemiAnalysis, Industry Estimates
Let us explain how. To properly develop a functional and robust piece of hardware, the creation + recreation (i.e. manufacturing) must be iterated repeatedly and rapidly to work out the kinks and perfect the product before competitors. However, the most challenging thing for Western competitors is that Chinese markets are built to reward the company that can scale the fastest, so before a Chinese competitor ever enters the Western market it has already outclassed them in cost, all that’s left is for the quality to refine over the coming iterations.
GoPro tried to compete in the consumer drone market despite having most of its manufacturing based in China, Malaysia, and Japan, which meant that each iteration of their drone took several weeks – likely starting the design in California, sending over the details to the manufacturers in China and having them build it, and shipping it back to the USA before ever finding out what needed to be ironed out in this attempt. Contrast this with DJI, which was based in Shenzhen, meaning the company could get any needed part from any factory in Shenzhen within hours of ordering and iterate at an unreal speed.
As a result, in 2016, GoPro’s Karma Drone + Hero5 were outclassed by DJI’s drones. At $999 vs $1,099, DJI was slightly cheaper, had a battery life 50% longer, had obstacle avoidance already implemented, and the launch of the Karma was plagued with hardware issues and a recall/refund program for their faulty product, which sometimes lost power during operation. GoPro likely could have solved these problems through enough work, but the company simply didn’t have the time, as DJI had already surpassed them in every way.
Quickly after entering the Western markets, DJI’s incredible cost advantage and sheer production capacity quickly led to oversupplying the market, and capturing a massive amount of market share. Every other major drone company was quickly undercut heavily by DJI’s aggressive pricing. GoPro cited “margin challenges” being a reason for disbanding their Karma program, and many other companies crashed alongside. DJI was the only one to understand that this was a competition of scale and had long been prepared before entering the Western markets.
In the world of Robotics, manufacturing dominance is key. To build a complete and functional robot means recreating the robot countless times and fine-tuning each minor mistake until a solid, scalable, and cost-effective product. This luxury is readily available to those who have the manufacturing capacity nearby and at an affordable cost, and its absence means a disadvantage. With a share of GDP three times higher than that of the US, China’s industrial base outcompetes that of America’s in every possible way.
Source: Worldbank, FRED
Our goal with this multi-part Robotics series is to illuminate landscape of the robotics and manufacturing industry, and convey the magnitude of the labor transformation it is poised to unleash. In Part One, we examine the current state of the market and take a deep dive into the hardware architecture of commercially available industrial robots. Our analysis demonstrates that China is rapidly taking over the market, leaving competing nations behind and preparing to capture a revolutionary technology. We also explore the broader repercussions for the Western trailing-edge semiconductor ecosystem.
China’s ascendancy positions it perfectly to lead next-generation robotics—a field we anticipate will generate significantly higher macroeconomic benefits. In Parts Two and Three of our series, we will delve into the intricate hardware and software architectures of next-generation systems and address the remaining challenges on the path to achieving “Robotics AGI” across form factors. We will also pinpoint the likely frontrunners in this emerging market.
For now, let’s start with some basics and explain how why robots are more difficult to build than most understand.
More Than Just A “Robot”
Robotics is a systems engineering problem with the end goal being a machine, or multiple machines, that can produce one or more human unit of work at equal or lower cost than that of a human. The feat is designing both a system of hardware with many many interconnected individual parts integrated with the software layer, where the software layer understands how to move and plan with the hardware. Repeated iterations are necessary to identify the discrepancies between the two systems and resolve them toward perfect accuracy. In essence, this is a delicate dance between two systems, with each iteration of choreography carving synchronicity from complexity. What happens as each etch gets closer to resolution?....
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