Chief Marketing Officer / China
Decisions that slowed a year to protect a brand
- 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
Decisions & consequences
01Holding 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. Other Chinese makers were quoting European integrators well below us, and the incumbents had answered with project discounts. Europe contributed RMB 371 million of revenue that year at a gross margin near 40 per cent, and it was the only overseas region where our brand was established enough to lose.
The stakes went beyond one year's margin. Our 54 certified European integrators had quoted cells to their customers at the existing price, some for delivery a year later. A deep cut would have devalued their quotes, their demonstration stock and our case, made since 2017, that a Tingsong robot was not a cheap robot.
The head of European sales and our president supported the cut for good reasons: a market in recession, a team behind plan and competitors who would not wait. I proposed holding the list and introducing a price corridor, with discounts up to 8 per cent at the team's discretion and anything deeper approved jointly by me and the chief financial officer. The money we did not give away, about RMB 38 million in 2024, went into parts stock, application engineers and documentation. The board approved the corridor in December 2023, with a review after twelve months.
We paid for it. We lost two large tenders, one at an appliance plant in Poland and one at an automotive supplier in the Czech Republic, worth RMB 64 million together. European revenue grew only 7 per cent in 2024, to RMB 397 million, against a plan of 25 per cent, and two experienced salespeople left for a competitor.
In 2025 European revenue grew 31 per cent to RMB 520 million at a 38 per cent gross margin, and certified European integrators increased to 81. Our European realised price fell 4 per cent over two years, against 22 per cent at home. The corridor is now board policy for every overseas region.
What I would do differently: I would have told our integrators about the decision in person before the price list went out, and I would have put a margin measure in the sales team's bonus that year rather than volume alone. Two good people might have stayed.
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. Arvenis Otomasyon, a fictional Istanbul distributor, had represented us since 2018 and had done useful early work: it held parts, translated documentation and introduced us to plants in Bursa and Manisa. By 2021 it was marking up our spare parts by about 70 per cent, taking five working days on average to deliver them, and had added a rival Chinese brand to its range.
Turkey was worth RMB 118 million of revenue in 2021, in a market where automotive suppliers and appliance makers were adding capacity. If our robots acquired a reputation for slow parts there, we would lose the market at its best moment.
The head of overseas sales wanted to renegotiate the margin. Our founder and chairman, who had signed the original agreement, preferred to keep the relationship intact. I proposed giving the twelve months' notice the contract required, buying back the distributor's stock of our parts, opening our own parts store and application centre in Bursa, and certifying integrators directly. The Strategy Committee accepted the plan after asking for the full cost to be shown in one paper.
The cost was real. We bought back RMB 14 million of parts, spent RMB 9 million on the Bursa site and lost three large accounts that followed the distributor to the rival brand. Turkish revenue fell to RMB 86 million in 2022, and for most of that year integrators asked whether we were leaving Turkey altogether.
We certified 14 Turkish integrators in the first year and 26 by 2025. Parts orders in the Marmara region are now delivered the next working day in 93 per cent of cases, and Turkish revenue reached RMB 205 million in 2025. The decision also changed how we enter markets: every distributor agreement now carries a review after three years and a defined path to direct integrator certification.
I would do two things differently. I would have offered the distributor the chance to become a certified integrator rather than leave entirely, because two of its engineers were among the best in the country. And I would have visited every major integrator before the notice was served, not after it.
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. We had the means to answer: service records for 52,000 robots installed since 2016, with every unplanned repair of a reducer, motor or controller logged by serial number.
The data contained an awkward fact. The TS-450, our heavy palletising robot, was needing an unplanned reducer replacement within three years at a rate of 6.8 per cent, against 1.9 per cent across the fleet. The cause was a reducer supplier change in 2020. About 1,900 TS-450 robots built since then were in service, 640 of them outside China.
Our head of quality and the head of the palletising product line both wanted to publish fleet averages only. They argued that model-level data would hand competitors a weapon and frighten customers whose robots had not failed. I argued that integrators who had already replaced TS-450 reducers knew the truth, and that a report without the weak model would be exposed as selective within a quarter. The president agreed to model-level publication on one condition, which I accepted: the retrofit plan had to be announced alongside the figures.
We funded a RMB 46 million programme to replace the reducer on every TS-450 built since 2020, free of charge, and changed supplier for new production. TS-450 orders in Europe fell by about 40 per cent for three quarters, roughly RMB 37 million of revenue, and one competitor's sales team carried our report into customer meetings.
By 2025 the repair rate for TS-450 robots built or retrofitted after the change was 1.7 per cent. Integrators began attaching our field record to their own tenders, and three told us it was why they had quoted our robots to plants that had previously refused Chinese ones. The record is now published every March, and an outside engineering firm reviews the method.
What I would do differently: I would have written to every affected TS-450 customer with their retrofit date before the report was published. Several heard about the problem from a competitor first, and that was avoidable.
Moving fair money into application centres where integrators bring their parts
In 2021 we spent RMB 41 million on stands at 14 international trade fairs, and fewer than one in sixteen of the contacts scanned there became an opportunity an integrator would confirm. The stands were large and handsome. Our founder valued them as proof that a Chinese robot maker belonged in the main halls, and our European sales team saw them as the place where the year's meetings were made.
The stakes were partly money and partly time. Integrators deciding whether to standardise on a robot brand wanted to see their own customer's part gripped, handled and welded, not a display arm tracing figures in the air. We had one place where they could do that, in Ludwigsburg, and a waiting list of seven weeks.
I proposed cutting to five fairs, keeping two of them at full scale with working cells and meeting rooms, and moving RMB 22 million a year into application centres in Bursa, Monterrey and Bac Ninh. The chairman disagreed strongly. He believed that a Chinese brand that shrinks its stand looks as if it is retreating, and he was not entirely wrong. We agreed that the two largest European fairs would keep full stands and that I would report brand awareness among integrators every year.
The trade-off showed up quickly. Prompted awareness of our brand among European integrators fell from 41 per cent in 2022 to 36 per cent in 2023, and the trade press wrote less about us. A competitor took the hall position we gave up at one fair and made a point of saying so.
The Bursa centre opened with the Turkish channel change in 2022; Monterrey and Bac Ninh followed in 2023. In 2024 integrators brought 640 customer parts for trials across the four centres, and 38 per cent of those trials became orders. Cost per integrator-qualified opportunity fell from RMB 21,000 to RMB 9,400, and prompted awareness recovered to 47 per cent by 2025. Every fair is now judged by meetings held and trials booked within ninety days.
I would do one thing differently. I cut a regional fair in Turkey that cost little and brought us most of our Anatolian integrators. I reinstated it in 2024, after a year in which I had to visit those integrators one at a time.