Beijing announces $1.4B robotics fund

Listen to this article

ForwardX, a Beijing-based developer of AMRs, pallet moving robots at work in a Dong Feng Motor Co facility. | Source: ForwardX Robotics

Beijing announced its plans to create a 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) robotics fund to promote robotics technology development in the city. The fund is part of a broader effort to establish Beijing as the industry’s international industrial highland. 

The robotics fund will be used to help incubate the latest innovations, develop commercial breakthroughs, and finance mergers-and-acquisition activities of local companies within the industry, according to a notice from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology. 

The Beijing government also plans to use the fund to provide subsidies and incentives to accelerate the creation of a robotics supply chain in the city. These subsidies include up to 30 million yuan ($4 million), to support companies obtaining key components like semiconductors and operating systems, develop facilities for companies and researchers to use to build prototypes and draw up automated processes for manufacturing robots. 

An initial capital investment into the program of 2 billion yuan ($274 million), has already been pledged by the Beijing municipal government, according to the notice published by the city’s technology promotion agency. 

China has made it clear it’s setting its sights on developing its robotics industry within the past few years. Earlier this year, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, along with 17 other agencies, created a new action plan called the “Robot + Application Action Plan.” This plan lays out 10 industries, manufacturing, agriculture, architecture, logistics, energy, healthcare, education, elderly services, commercial community service (things like Pudu Robotics‘ service robots) and emergency and extreme environment applications, it wants to focus on automating. 

The country aims to have around 500 robots per 10,000 workers by 2025. Data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) shows that China has been aggressively installing more robots in recent years.

In 2021, the country’s industrial robotics market saw 243,300 installations, a 44% increase from the year before. Those installations are evident in China’s jump from being tied for the ninth most automated country worldwide in 2020 to being the fifth most automated country in 2021, surpassing Chinese Taipei, the United States, Hong Kong and Sweden in robot density. 

In December 2021, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in collaboration with 14 other government departments, revealed how it will continue to grow the country’s robotics industry in its 14th five-year plan.

The document lays out several smaller goals for the Chinese robotics industry before 2025, but the overarching goal is to make China a key source of global robotics innovation. The government also expects the average annual growth rate of operating income in the robotics industry to exceed 20%.