Trust in a Chinese machine is built in the service van
Chinese industrial brands try to buy trust abroad with sponsorships, certificates and enormous stands. Integrators and plant engineers extend it for duller reasons: a part that arrives tomorrow, an engineer who answers in their language and a maker willing to publish its own failure rates.
When I arrived in Ludwigsburg in 2017 to build our European marketing, I brought a brand plan. It had a positioning statement, a visual identity adapted for German readers, a schedule of trade fairs and a modest advertising budget for the engineering press. Within a month I had put most of it aside. The integrators I visited were polite about our robots and indifferent to our plan. Each of them asked some version of the same three questions. Where are your spare parts? Who answers the telephone in German when a cell stops on a Sunday night? And what do your robots fail on?
Those questions describe the problem every Chinese industrial brand faces abroad more precisely than any survey I have commissioned since. The doubt is not mainly about engineering. Plant engineers in Germany, Turkey and Mexico know that Chinese factories make good machines; many of the components inside the robots they already own come from Chinese suppliers. The doubt is about what happens after the sale, when the maker is far away, the manual has been translated badly and the integrator that recommended the brand has to explain a stopped line to its customer.
Chinese industrial companies often respond to that doubt with the tools of consumer marketing. They sponsor sports teams, build enormous stands, hire European spokespeople and fill brochures with certificates. Some of this has value. Most of it answers a question the buyer did not ask.
Certificates are the entry fee
A robot sold in the European Union must meet the Union's machinery safety rules and carry the conformity marking, and a cell built around it has to be assessed as a whole. Safety functions in the controller have to be designed and certified against recognised standards. Our robots meet those requirements, as do those of every serious competitor. That is precisely why they do not distinguish us.
I still see Chinese industrial brochures that devote a full page to certificates, quality-management standards and test reports, as if each were an honour. To a European integrator this reads oddly, rather like a restaurant advertising that it holds a hygiene licence. The certificate is a condition of being considered at all, and drawing attention to it suggests that the maker expects the buyer to doubt even that.
We now describe conformity and certification in a single technical annex, accurately and completely, and spend the rest of our material on evidence that differs between makers: how quickly parts arrive, how often robots need unplanned repairs and how long it takes to restore a stopped line. Those are the numbers a plant engineer remembers when choosing between brands.
Publish the record, weak model included
Every robot maker quotes a reliability figure. The usual one is a mean time between failures, often stated in tens of thousands of hours and rarely accompanied by any account of what counted as a failure or which robots were measured. Integrators have learnt to ignore it.
In 2023 we decided to publish something they could check. Our field record draws on the service logs of 52,000 robots installed since 2016 and reports, for each robot family, the share that needed an unplanned repair of a reducer, a motor or the controller within three years of installation. It explains how the figures were calculated, which robots were excluded and why. An outside engineering firm reviews the method every year.
The first edition carried bad news about one of our own products. Our heavy palletiser had a reducer problem traced to a supplier change, and its repair rate was more than three times the fleet average. Colleagues I respect argued that we should publish only the fleet figure, and I understood why. But integrators who had already replaced those reducers knew the truth, and a report that hid it would have been found out within months and would have discredited every other number in it. We published the model's figures alongside a free retrofit programme. Orders for that robot fell sharply for three quarters, which was the price of being believed about all the others.
What surprised me was who used the report. I expected our own sales team to quote it. In practice integrators attached it to their tender documents, because it let them defend the choice of a Chinese robot to a customer's engineering department with data that was not theirs. Trust that a partner can pass on is worth more than trust we ask for directly.
Measure the hours to restore
The most useful number in our marketing reports is not a marketing number at all. It is the median time between an integrator reporting an unplanned stop and the robot running again, measured by region. In Europe in 2022 it was 41 hours. By 2025 it was nine. Most of the improvement came from parts depots in Ludwigsburg and Bursa, from application engineers who answer in German, Turkish or Spanish, and from a rule that any part listed as critical leaves the depot on the day it is ordered.
I report that figure to our executive committee alongside revenue and margin, and our board sees it every year. Some colleagues find it odd that the chief marketing officer reports a service measure. I think it would be odder not to. For an industrial brand abroad, most of the brand is made in the service van, and a marketing function that does not measure what happens there is measuring the wrong things.
The argument has limits. Service evidence builds trust slowly, market by market, and it creates no awareness where nobody has heard of the brand. We still exhibit at trade fairs and still write technical articles for the engineering press. Awareness matters at the start; it is simply not what decides the second order. I would rather have a smaller number of integrators who can show their customers our field record than a larger number who recognise our logo from a stadium.
For other Chinese manufacturers selling industrial products abroad, my advice comes in three parts. Put your certificates in an annex. Publish a reliability record that includes your weakest product, and fix that product in public. And make the time it takes to restore a stopped line one of the numbers on which your marketing function is judged.