Electronics Passed Automotive as China's Top Robot Buyer
IFR: China's electronics industry installed 96,400 robots in 2025, edging out automotive's 78,900. Our own catalog still tags automotive at 70%.
China’s electrical and electronics industry installed 96,400 industrial robots in 2025, more than any other customer sector in the world’s largest robot market, according to the International Federation of Robotics’ World Robotics 2026 report. Automotive, the industry robots were built around for forty years, came in second at 78,900. Our own database still tags 70% of its 425 robots as automotive-capable, against 56% for electronics. The world’s biggest buyer has moved on. The catalog hasn’t caught up.
What is China actually buying robots for now?
IFR’s China-specific release, published September 24 and read directly from its own PDF rather than a summary, breaks out 2025 installations by customer industry. Electrical and electronics led at 96,400 units, up 16%, a 27% share of China’s 354,000 total installations. Automotive set a new volume record at 78,900 units, up 38%, but that was still only good for second place. Metal and machinery came a close third at 78,700, up 44%. The gap between automotive and metal and machinery, the #2 and #3 spots, is 200 units out of 354,000, close enough that IFR’s own ranking could flip next year on a rounding error. Automotive’s real distance is from the top: electronics outsold it by 17,500 units.
The newer sectors are not a stable trend yet. Food and beverage installations grew 86% in 2024, then fell 37% in 2025. Textiles grew at a 115% compound annual rate from 2019 to 2024, then collapsed 92% in a single year. Paper and paper products, by contrast, kept growing at 15% after a 55% CAGR run. IFR’s own framing: heavy industry is carrying China’s robot demand, and the newer bets are still volatile.
| China 2025 customer industry | Installations | Share | Change vs 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical & electronics | 96,400 | 27% | +16% |
| Automotive | 78,900 | 22.3% | +38% |
| Metal & machinery | 78,700 | 22.2% | +44% |
| Food & beverage | not stated | — | -37% |
| Textiles, leather, apparel | not stated | — | -92% |
Source: IFR World Robotics 2026, China-specific press release, September 24, 2026.
China’s 2025 robot installations by top customer industry. Electronics leads; automotive’s real margin is over the field, not over metal and machinery.
Does the same shift show up in the US?
No. The US passed Japan into second place worldwide in 2025 with 38,400 installations, up 12%, but its industry mix looks nothing like China’s. Automotive stayed the largest US customer at 13,500 units, 35% of the country’s total, even though that was a 1% decline. Metal and machinery ranked second at 3,000 units, down 15%. Food and beverage rose 30% to 2,900 units. IFR’s president, Jane Heffner, credited the US’s growth to “the food industry and sectors like warehousing, logistics or medical,” while noting automotive “stayed stable as the largest customer.” China’s robot economy has diversified past its founding industry. The US, the new #2 market, has not, at least not yet.
What does our own catalog say robots are for?
We re-ran the count live against all 425 robots in the Industrial Robotics Hub database. 416 (97.9%) carry at least one industries tag, normalized across spelling variants the way our brand-reach analysis already established. Automotive is tagged on 298 robots, 70.1% of the full catalog. Electronics is tagged on 239, 56.2%. Metal is tagged on 131, 30.8%.
| Catalog industry tag | Robots tagged | Share of catalog |
|---|---|---|
| Automotive | 298 | 70.1% |
| Electronics | 239 | 56.2% |
| Metal | 131 | 30.8% |
| Manufacturing (general) | 129 | 30.4% |
| Food & beverage | 100 | 23.5% |
| Medical & pharma | 72 | 16.9% |
Source: Industrial Robotics Hub database, 425 robots, live query, September 27, 2026. A robot can carry more than one industry tag, so the column does not sum to 100%.
Industrial Robotics Hub catalog, industry-tag prevalence across 425 robots. Automotive still leads by a wide margin over electronics.
Why the mismatch, and what should a buyer do with it?
Two different things are being measured here, and the difference matters more than the headline gap. IFR’s numbers are real 2025 installations, one robot counted once, in whichever industry actually bought it. Our industries field is a capability tag: a robot can be marked automotive AND electronics AND metal if it’s built for general-purpose handling, which is most of the catalog. Of the 239 robots tagged electronics, 153 (64.0%) are also tagged automotive. The two labels overlap on the same general-purpose arms more than they compete for different hardware. So a 70%-vs-56% catalog gap doesn’t mean electronics buyers have fewer real options, it means automotive is still the default label manufacturers reach for first, a holdover from the industry automotive volume built.
That default has a real cost for a buyer chasing where the growth actually is. We already found that electronics-tagged robots need roughly 2.5x tighter repeatability than automotive-tagged ones, 0.02mm median against 0.05mm. An automotive-tagged robot carrying an electronics tag too isn’t necessarily precise enough for the work; the tag says “can serve this industry” in the broadest sense, not “built to this industry’s tolerance.” If you’re sourcing for China’s fastest-growing segment, check the repeatability spec on the specific model, not the industry tag list. The catalog’s automotive-first framing is closer to how the US buys robots (automotive still 35% of installs, the clear #1) than to how China, the market that actually set the 2025 record, buys them now. Our country-of-origin work already found Japan and China supply 69.6% of the catalog between them; this is the demand-side half of that picture, and it hasn’t shifted with the market it’s supposed to describe.
One inconsistency worth flagging rather than quietly picking a number: IFR’s own China release states 354,000 total installations, while its US release, in the same September 24 batch, describes China’s total as “354,200 units, which is 59% of the global demand.” A 200-unit gap between two documents from the same federation, published the same day. We used the China release’s own figure, 354,000, for the percentages above, since it’s the source that actually breaks the total down by industry.
Sources: IFR, “China Installs 59 Percent of World’s Industrial Robots”, IFR, “U.S. now Second-Largest Robotics Market, Following China”, and our own coverage of the 5-million-robot global milestone.
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