What marketing an industrial robot abroad actually involves

Outside China we sell almost every robot through system integrators, and I treat them as the buyer whose judgement makes or breaks the brand. Our certification programme has three tiers. A certified integrator has two engineers trained on our controller and has delivered at least one cell; a premier integrator holds parts stock, has delivered ten cells and runs its own demonstration robot; an application partner co-develops a cell type, such as heavy-bag palletising or aluminium welding, which we then document for everyone else. Territory is not exclusive, but project registration protects the integrator that first brings us a customer. We pay no rebates for volume alone; support funds follow trained engineers and completed trials. I have ended two master-distributor arrangements, in Turkey in 2022 and Vietnam in 2023, when the distributor's interest in parts margin outgrew its interest in our customers. Distributors still suit the first two years in a small market, and I say so in every market-entry paper.

Our domestic and export markets now behave differently, and pricing has to keep them apart. At home the realised price of our six-axis robots has fallen by more than a fifth since 2023 as dozens of makers fight for share. Abroad we publish a list price for each region and run a corridor beneath it: sales may discount up to 8 per cent, and anything deeper needs my approval and the chief financial officer's, with the reason and the expected service revenue written down. Since 2023 we have approved four strategic exceptions for manufacturers standardising across several plants, and we review each one after a year; two have not yet earned their discount. I model price against the integrator's total cost, including commissioning hours, parts and downtime, because that is how a German or Turkish integrator compares us with the incumbent brands. I also watch the gap between domestic and export prices with trade-defence risk in mind.

A Chinese industrial brand abroad starts with a trust deficit that advertising cannot close. What closes it is evidence a plant engineer can check. Since 2023 we have published an annual field record: the share of robots in each family needing an unplanned repair of a reducer, motor or controller within three years, drawn from the service records of 52,000 robots installed since 2016, with the method reviewed by an outside engineering firm. We also publish the median time to restore production after an unplanned stop, by region. Marketing owns the publication; quality and service own the numbers, and I do not edit them. When the TS-450 palletiser showed a reducer repair rate more than three times the fleet average, we published it with the retrofit plan rather than waiting for the redesign. Conformity marking and functional-safety certification sit underneath all of this. They are conditions of sale, and our materials never present them as distinctions.

Industrial robots are still bought after someone has watched one handle their own part. That is why I judge trade fairs by the meetings they produce with integrators and the trials booked within ninety days, not by badge scans. We now attend five international fairs instead of fourteen, two of them at full scale, with working cells and meeting rooms rather than display arms on plinths. The money moved into application centres in Ludwigsburg, Bursa, Monterrey and Bac Ninh, where integrators bring a customer's parts and leave with cycle-time evidence. Digital demand matters more each year, but our best digital signal is not a completed form. It is an engineer downloading a 3D model or simulation file of one of our robots to test a cell layout. In 2025 there were about 23,000 such downloads outside China, and each one from a covered territory is offered within one working day to a certified integrator nearby.

Trade policy shapes our market map as much as demand does. Since 2018 the United States has applied additional tariffs to a wide range of Chinese-made industrial equipment, robots among them, and in 2021 I recommended that we not build a US sales organisation. US revenue remains below 2 per cent of our total, mostly through two integrators serving existing customers. Elsewhere I treat trade-defence risk as a marketing question as well as a legal one, because export prices sitting far below domestic prices and costs are exactly what an anti-dumping complaint examines. Our entry sequence favours countries where manufacturing investment is growing and local robot production is small, such as Turkey, Mexico and Vietnam. I take advice from trade counsel on origin and customs questions, and marketing never describes a robot's origin more favourably than the customs rules would.