Integrators are the customer, not the channel

Most industrial companies I know, in China and elsewhere, describe the businesses that resell and install their products as a channel. The word carries an assumption: that the real customer is the factory at the end, and that the partners in between are a route to it, to be managed for coverage, margin and loyalty like pipes in a building. For robots sold abroad I think the assumption is wrong, and it leads makers into decisions that cost them their best partners.

Who carries the risk of the cell

A factory that wants to automate a welding line rarely buys a robot. It buys a cell: a robot, a welding power source, fixtures, guarding, a safety system, programs and a commissioning period, delivered at a fixed price by a system integrator. The integrator chooses the robot, designs the cell around it, programs it and answers when it stops. If the robot fails, the factory calls the integrator, not us. If the cell misses its cycle time, the integrator pays for the extra weeks of engineering.

That makes the integrator the buyer whose judgement matters most. A plant owner may prefer a brand, but in our experience it is the integrator who decides whether a Chinese robot is quoted at all. An integrator that standardises on a robot brand invests in training, spare parts, demonstration equipment and program libraries. It stakes its own name on our product every time it quotes.

Treating that buyer as a channel produces predictable mistakes. Makers sign national master distributors who sit between them and the integrators, add margin and control the flow of parts. That is often sensible for a first entry into a small market. It becomes a problem when the distributor's interest in parts margin outgrows its interest in the integrators' customers. We ended such arrangements in Turkey in 2022 and in Vietnam in 2023, at a real cost in revenue each time, because integrators in both countries were telling us that parts and support had become slow and expensive.

The alternative we chose is a certification programme with three tiers, each defined by what an integrator has invested and delivered rather than by the volume it buys. Territory is not exclusive, but a registered project is protected: an integrator that brings us a customer is not undercut by our own sales team or by another partner offered a better price. Support funds follow trained engineers and completed trials, not purchase volume. We now have 148 certified integrators outside China, and I spend more of my time on what they need than on any campaign.

Digital demand that integrators can use

The same assumption distorts digital marketing. If integrators are a channel, a maker's website exists to capture factory leads and pass them down the pipe. If integrators are the customer, the website exists to make their engineering work easier and to send them projects worth their time.

When I reviewed our digital programme in 2021, it had been built for the first purpose. We bought contact lists, ran campaigns aimed at plant managers and measured success by form submissions. Fewer than one in twenty of those leads became a project an integrator would accept, and integrators complained, fairly, that our leads wasted their engineers' afternoons.

We rebuilt the programme around evidence that someone is designing a cell. Our website now offers 3D models, simulation files and reach studies for every robot, along with program libraries for common applications. An engineer who downloads a model to test a cell layout is much further along than one who fills in a form for a brochure. In 2025 there were about 23,000 such downloads outside China. Where a download comes from a territory covered by a certified integrator, the enquiry is offered to that integrator within one working day, in the local language, with whatever we know about the application. About 3,100 of those referrals became registered projects in 2025.

Language turned out to matter more than we expected. A referral written in Turkish or Spanish, with the part drawing and the cycle time the engineer was testing, was accepted by integrators about three times as often as the same referral in English. We now staff the referral desk with engineers who speak the integrators' languages, not with call-centre agents reading a script.

We stopped buying contact lists in 2022. Our lead volume fell by more than half. The number of projects integrators accepted from us rose, and so did their willingness to return our calls.

When we sell direct, and how we say so

There are customers we serve directly: a handful of multinational manufacturers with plants in several countries, who want one contract and one service agreement for all of them. Integrators sometimes see this as a betrayal, and it can be one if a maker uses direct contracts to take the most attractive customers for itself.

Our rule is written down and sent to every certified integrator. We sell direct only to manufacturers that require a multi-country agreement. In each such contract an integrator of record is named for every plant, receives a defined fee for commissioning and support, and keeps the service relationship with that plant. If an integrator brought us the customer, it is offered the integrator-of-record role first. Direct contracts accounted for 9 per cent of overseas revenue in 2025, and I expect that share to stay below 15 per cent.

The rule costs us margin we could otherwise keep. It also means an integrator can introduce us to a large customer without fearing that we will take the customer away. I have watched other makers lose the best integrators in a country by breaking that trust once, and against that the cost looks small.

I do not argue that every industrial maker abroad should abandon distributors. In a market with a few dozen potential customers, a capable distributor may be the only sensible route for years, and our own Turkish distributor did valuable work in its first three. My argument is narrower. Know who carries the risk of the product once it is installed, treat that party as the customer, and design prices, contracts, digital programmes and direct sales around its interests. The factory at the end of the line will notice the difference, usually the first time something stops.