Where Industrial Robots Are Made: A 336-Robot Country Breakdown

China now builds more of the industrial robots in our database than any other single country, 128 of 336, 38.1%, edging out Japan’s 118, 35.1%. That alone isn’t the story. The story is the age gap underneath it: every Japanese, German, and Swiss brand we track was founded before 1990, the oldest in 1892. Every Chinese brand we track was founded between 1993 and 2017, a median company age of 11.5 years against a 93-year median for the legacy makers whose catalog share it’s now matching.

Which country makes the most industrial robots in our database?

Our analysis covers all 336 robots across the 20 brands in the Industrial Robotics Hub database, resolved to a country of origin for every single one, no gaps. Only 192 of those robots (57.1%) carry a country directly on the robot record itself; the rest resolve through the parent brand’s HQ country, which is populated on all 20 brands. Browse the full set at /brands/.

Country	Robots	Share	Brands
China	128	38.1%	AUBO, Dobot, Estun, Han’s Robot, Inovance, JAKA, ROKAE, Siasun
Japan	118	35.1%	Epson, FANUC, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi Electric, OMRON, Yaskawa Motoman
Switzerland	39	11.6%	ABB Robotics, Stäubli Robotics
Germany	19	5.7%	KUKA
South Korea	12	3.6%	Doosan Robotics
Taiwan	11	3.3%	Techman Robot
Denmark	9	2.7%	Universal Robots

Source: our analysis of src/content/brands/*.json (country, HQ, founded) applied to all 336 robots in src/content/robots/*.json, 2026-07-19.

Stack every non-Chinese legacy maker together (Japan, Switzerland, Germany: 176 robots, 52.4%) and China is still the minority. But no single one of those countries beats it alone, and none of their brands is younger than 1969. China winning the single-country race is the finding worth sitting with.

How old are the companies behind these robots?

This is where the number gets strange. Sort all 20 brands by founding year and a hard line appears at 1990: nine brands founded before it (all Japanese, Swiss, or German), eight founded after it (all Chinese), and two founded in between (Universal Robots, Denmark, 2005, and a fresh wave starting with Estun, China, 1993).

Founded	Brand	Country	Company age (2026)
1892	Stäubli Robotics	Switzerland	134 years
1898	KUKA	Germany	128 years
1915	Yaskawa Motoman	Japan	111 years
1921	Mitsubishi Electric	Japan	105 years
1933	OMRON Robotics	Japan	93 years
1969	Kawasaki Robotics	Japan	57 years
1972	FANUC	Japan	54 years
1982	Epson Robots	Japan	44 years
1988	ABB Robotics	Switzerland	38 years
1993	Estun	China	33 years
2000	Siasun	China	26 years
2003	Inovance	China	23 years
2005	Universal Robots	Denmark	21 years
2014	JAKA	China	12 years
2015	AUBO	China	11 years
2015	Dobot	China	11 years
2015	Doosan Robotics	South Korea	11 years
2015	ROKAE	China	11 years
2016	Techman Robot	Taiwan	10 years
2017	Han’s Robot	China	9 years

Source: founded field, src/content/brands/*.json, all 20 brands, 100% populated.

Blue = the nine pre-1990 legacy brands (all Japanese, Swiss, or German). Teal = the eight Chinese brands, all founded 1993 or later. Green = the two non-Chinese “young” brands: Universal Robots and Doosan.

Does a 134-year head start still show up in the catalog?

Not in market share. Stäubli built its first machine tool in 1892, sixty years before the transistor. KUKA welded its first robot arm onto a production line in 1973, having existed as a company since 1898. Yaskawa (1915), Mitsubishi Electric (1921), and OMRON (1933) all predate industrial robotics as a category by decades. Compare that to Han’s Robot, founded 2017, whose entire nine-year existence sits inside the time it took Stäubli to go from its 100th to its 110th birthday.

Age hasn’t bought the legacy brands a durable catalog-share lead. China’s eight brands, with a combined company age you could round to “younger than the newest KUKA controller generation,” now outnumber Japan’s six brands 128 robots to 118. That’s not a hardware-quality claim, our Chinese robots buyer reality check covers the service-network and parts-lead-time gaps that still separate the two groups. It’s a catalog-breadth claim: measured by how many models a brand has shipped into a spec database like this one, the newest entrants have caught the oldest incumbents in nine to twenty years.

Universal Robots (Denmark, founded 2005, 21 years old) and Doosan Robotics (South Korea, founded 2015, 11 years old) are the reminder that this isn’t purely a China-versus-everyone-else story. Both are non-Chinese brands that built meaningful catalog presence, 9 and 12 robots respectively, without a 20th-century head start. The real dividing line isn’t nationality, it’s whether a brand entered the market before or after the cobot boom of the mid-2010s made building an industrial robot company cheaper and faster than it was in 1988, let alone 1892.

What this means for a buyer comparing brands

Company age tells you almost nothing about a robot’s spec sheet, and this dataset proves it: the newest brand in our database (Han’s Robot, 9 years old) publishes cobots with repeatability figures that sit inside the same range as Stäubli’s, a company 125 years its senior. What company age still predicts reasonably well is depth of service infrastructure, established integration partnerships, and parts-supply maturity, the things a spec JSON can’t capture. If you’re weighing a Chinese cobot against a Japanese or European one on hardware numbers alone, check our controller platform breakdown by brand and which robots are easiest to program by brand before you decide, those two data cuts show where the real operational differences still sit, regardless of how young or old the badge on the arm is.

The oldest brand we track is Stäubli, founded 1892 in Switzerland. The youngest is Han’s Robot, founded 2017 in Shenzhen. Both sell industrial robots today. Only one of them existed before the light bulb was standard equipment in a factory.

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