Industrial robots are rapidly becoming a common part of manufacturing in some countries. The chart here shows how many new ones are installed each year in the industrialized countries for which we have available data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), Our World in Data (OWID) reports.
In this dataset, industrial robots are defined as automatically controlled, reprogrammable, and multipurpose machines used in industrial settings. The data covers only physical industrial robots, not software or consumer technologies.
The chart shows that in 2011, China, the United States, Japan, Germany, and South Korea were all installing similar numbers of these robots. However, in the decade that followed, the paths of these countries diverged. By 2023, annual installations in China had risen to 276,000 robots, a twelvefold increase.
Over the same period, installations in the United States, Japan, Germany, and South Korea also increased, but much more slowly: none of them even doubled. The United States, which saw the second-largest rise, went from 21,000 new installations in 2011 to 38,000 in 2023.
These figures refer to new robots installed each year; that is, annual additions to the existing stock of robots. The IFR also publishes data on the total number of robots in operation, and by this measure, China also had the largest installed base, at around 1.76mn robots in 2023.
Relative to its large manufacturing sector, China’s stock of robots today does not stand out – but the data here shows that this is changing quickly.
Explore the interactive version of this chart.
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