An industrial brand its integrators can stand behind
China's industrial-robot makers have spent three years cutting prices against each other at home. Carrying those cuts abroad looks like ambition, but it teaches integrators to doubt the product, harms the partners who sell it and produces the evidence a trade-defence complaint needs.
Holding European list prices while home prices fell by a fifth
In the autumn of 2023, with our average realised price in China down 11 per cent in a year and still falling, our European sales team proposed cutting the 2024 European list by 15 per cent.
Replacing our Turkish master distributor with certified integrators
In early 2022 a single master distributor accounted for 64 per cent of our sales in Turkey, and the integrators who bought through it were telling us they would stop.
Publishing failure rates by model, including the palletiser that was failing
In 2023 European integrators began asking us for reliability data we could defend, because competitors were quoting mean-time-between-failure figures without saying how they had been measured.
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.
Industrial makers selling abroad call system integrators a channel and manage them for coverage and margin. The integrator is the buyer who stakes its reputation on the product, and prices, contracts, digital programmes and direct sales should all start from that fact.
Revenue, 2025
RMB 3.86 bn
18,600 robots shipped from Nanjing and Changzhou
Share of revenue earned outside China, 2025
35%
Up from 18 per cent in 2020
Certified integrators abroad
148
Across 23 countries, from 31 in 2020
Abroad, an integrator stakes its own name on our robot, so I build the brand from spare parts, published failure rates and prices that do not chase the home market down.
I am chief marketing officer of Tingsong Robotics Company Limited, a fictional Nanjing manufacturer of industrial robots listed on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. We make six-axis articulated arms, SCARA and palletising robots and complete welding cells, with our own servo drives and controllers from a plant in Changzhou. In 2025 we shipped 18,600 robots and earned revenue of RMB 3.86 billion. Thirty-five per cent of it came from outside China, through 148 certified system integrators in 23 countries, against 18 per cent when I took this role in April 2021.
My career has run on both sides of the question I now work on. I started in 2001 commissioning a Swiss robot maker's welding cells for Chinese auto-parts plants that paid a premium for a foreign brand, and later marketed those robots in China. I led marketing at a Shenzhen servo-drive maker through a price fight, joined Tingsong in 2014, and spent three and a half years in Ludwigsburg building our brand among German integrators who had never quoted a Chinese robot.
What I learnt in Germany decides most of what I do now. Integrators abroad did not ask us for a lower price. They asked where the spare parts were kept, who would answer in their language when a cell stopped at night, and what our robots actually failed on. So when the price war at home deepened in 2023, I argued that we should hold our prices abroad and spend the difference on parts depots, application engineers and a published field record. It cost us two large tenders and a slow year in Europe. I think it is the reason our integrators stayed.
Overseas revenue from 18 to 35 per cent
Overseas revenue rose from RMB 420 million in 2020 to RMB 1.35 billion in 2025, and certified integrators abroad from 31 to 148. Europe contributed RMB 520 million at a 38 per cent gross margin; our domestic gross margin in the same year was 19 per cent.
A price corridor through a price war
Between 2023 and 2025 our average realised price fell 22 per cent in China and 4 per cent in Europe. Holding the European list cost two tenders worth RMB 64 million and held 2024 European growth to 7 per cent, before it recovered to 31 per cent in 2025.
Failure rates published by model
Since 2023 we have published unplanned-repair rates for each robot family from the service records of 52,000 installed robots, including a palletiser whose reducer was failing. Its RMB 46 million retrofit was announced with the figures, and its repair rate is now below the fleet average.
Fair money moved into application centres
We cut international trade-fair spending from RMB 41 million to RMB 19 million a year and opened application centres in Bursa, Monterrey and Bac Ninh. In 2024 integrators brought 640 customer parts for trials, and 38 per cent of those trials became orders.
Current focus
I am preparing the Strategy Committee's decision on a RMB 240 million parts and configuration centre in Hungary that would cut delivery to European integrators from eleven weeks to four, including what we will and will not say about the robots' origin. I am also rewriting our integrator certification for collaborative robots, where the safety assessment of each application matters more than the robot.
Conversations I welcome
I am not looking to leave Tingsong. With my board's consent, I would consider one independent directorship at a listed Chinese manufacturer outside automation that is taking its own brand abroad, joining its strategy and nomination committees, for about twenty-five days a year. I also speak occasionally to export marketers and industrial buyers.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
Formation
Bachelor of Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and AutomationBaixia Institute of Technology · 2001
Executive MBA, part-timeMochou Business School · 2013
We were among the first integrators in Baden-Württemberg to certify on Tingsong robots, and we did it because of one conversation with Wen Guo in 2018. She asked what would make me lose sleep over a Chinese robot and wrote my answers down. Within two years the parts store, the German manuals and the hotline were all there, in that order.
Torsten WehlingFictional managing director, Falkenrode Automation GmbH, a system integrator near HeilbronnThe full record ↗
Contact
I am not looking to leave Tingsong. With my board's consent, I would consider one independent directorship at a listed Chinese manufacturer outside automation that is taking its own brand abroad, joining its strategy and nomination committees, for about twenty-five days a year. I also speak occasionally to export marketers and industrial buyers.
