Author | Liu Jingfeng

At the Paris Olympics, China's drones once again showed off in the global spotlight.

On July 14, when the Olympic flame arrived in Paris from Greece, 1,100 drones staged a gorgeous show at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, carrying drones with cold fireworks to light up the night sky with Olympic rings, the Paris Olympic emblem, torchbearers and other elements.

The drone swarm of this performance is none other than HighGreat Innovation from Shenzhen. It is said that their drone formations will perform for a long time at the Palace of Versailles, which is really a feast for foreigners.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are part of the robot industry under Shenzhen's intelligent manufacturing. In fact, in addition to drones, Shenzhen's yard robots are creating a new whirlwind in middle-class families around the world.

At the beginning of 2023, at the CES exhibition, known as the "Spring Festival Gala of Science and Technology", a Shenzhen company exhibited a general-purpose robot that integrates functions such as weeding, snow clearing, and leaf blowing. Unexpectedly, in just 4 days, this garden robot with the brand name Yarbo has received more than 100 million US dollars of intent orders from dealers around the world, and more than 2,000 dealers have taken the initiative to contact Yarbo, including dealers of Husqvarna (Husqvarna), a leading yard tool brand with a history of more than 300 years.

This company is Hanyang Technology. Until then, little was known about the company. But since then, Hanyang Technology has begun to appear frequently in the European and American household robot markets with the world's first household intelligent snow clearing robot and consumer-grade modular garden robot.

On the other hand, Amazon, the largest e-commerce platform in North America, announced the 2023 Best Seller List of Smart Pool Cleaning (BS List). At the top of the list is a pool robot called Aiper. The company behind Aiper is Yuanding Intelligence, also from Shenzhen.

It is also in the last few days of 2023 that Shenzhen's UBTECH successfully listed in Hong Kong with the label of "the first stock of humanoid robots". UBTECH is most well-known for its deep accumulation in the field of robotics, with educational robots and logistics robots accounting for the highest proportion. These robots have even been used in high-end nursing homes in Japan and kindergartens in Korea.

Shenzhen, once known for its electronic products, is home to nearly 90% of the world's electronic products. In particular, Huaqiang Electronics Market is known as the largest electronic product distribution center in Asia. However, in recent years, with the upgrading of electronic products, Shenzhen's electronics industry has also quietly transformed. Today, what is more well-known here is that there are thousands of robot industry enterprises, of which the number of non-industrial robot enterprises accounts for 51.84% - industrial robots are mainly robots for industrial scenarios, including robotic arms, AGVs, and all kinds of welding, testing robots, etc., such robots have a long history of development, and the current market is almost monopolized by the overseas "four families"; In this case, Shenzhen benefits from the foundation of the electronics industry in the past, as well as the ability of scientific and technological innovation, and takes advantage of the overseas demand, is giving birth to a number of sub-categories under the global robot star enterprises.

From the city of electronics to the city of robots, Shenzhen is letting the world see another major transformation of China's technology industry.

The whole world knows that Europeans and Americans will be blessed. It's not enough to live in a big house, you have to have a garden, a lawn, and even a swimming pool.

Statista once made a statistic that there are about 250 million private gardens in the world, of which 100 million are concentrated in the United States and 80 million are distributed in European countries. The remaining nearly 7 billion people around the world are going to "grab" 70 million private gardens.

In it, the average 77 percent of European and American households engage in yard activities, and about 227 million United States own yard equipment, which they spend tens of billions of dollars a year.

In the early days, these middle-class families often had a "five-piece set" of garden tools: lawn mowers, lawn mowers, hair dryers, pruners, chain saws and other equipment. This has also given rise to global lawn mower giants such as Husqvarna, Gardena (acquired by Husqvarna) and Baoshide, which once accounted for about 90% of the global lawn mower market share. However, in recent years, under the pressure of environmental protection, some United States states and some European countries have begun to ban the sale of some gas-fired and oil-powered equipment, which has led to a great demand for more environmentally friendly intelligent garden robots.

Some technology companies from China just saw this opportunity.

Songling Robot, which started as a parking AGV, aimed at the intelligent garden robot market in 2019, and launched the first generation of pure electric commercial lawn mower robots with the subcategory of lawn mower robots as the entry point; Subsequently, it launched its sub-brand Mammotion, and in 2022, it successively released intelligent lawn mowing robot products LUBA and KUMAR. Compared with traditional lawn mowers, the biggest difference between the intelligent lawn mower robot is not only pure electric, but also pure automatic - it uses the satellite signals of the positioning system to realize automatic mowing by planning the mowing area and mowing height, time and route in advance.

This also impressed the garden owners in Europe and the United States. In the past, the work of mowing the lawn usually every two weeks has become a burden for many people. A robot that can mow the grass automatically solves these troubles. As a result, LUBA has become a winning general on the Amazon BS list, ranking first in the category.

In addition to Kuli Power, there are also the more well-known No. 9 Robot, Ecovacs, Roborock, ULsee, Yosmy and Bangus, as well as start-ups Ruichi Wisdom and Hesenburg, which are also laying out the market of lawn mower robots, and even the past lawn mower giants Husqvarna and Baoshide are laying out this track. However, these companies are forming different gathering areas - Ecovacs, Roborock and other enterprises, concentrated in Jiangsu and Zhejiang and other global tool industry ODM manufacturers gathering areas; The lawn mower robot start-ups such as Kuli Power, Ruichi Wisdom, and Hesenburg, which have aimed at the European and American markets from the beginning, have gathered in Shenzhen.

Mowing the grass is one of the largest tasks in the courtyard economy, and it is also an extremely competitive track. In contrast, snow removal is also a rigid need, and nearly 70% of the population of United States lives in snow areas, but it is much less competitive.

In the past, snow plows were common, but robots that can remove snow automatically are not available worldwide. It was not until 2017 that a team from Huawei, Husqvarna, ASM, and the Germany Aerospace Agency officially launched the snow clearing robot project in Shenzhen, which created this subdivision. This team is none other than Hanyang Technology, which officially launched the beta version of the world's first home intelligent snow plowing robot, Snowbot, in 2021. In 2022, Hanyang Technology launched the garden robot product Yarbo, which is a robot that can switch to different functions such as snow clearing, grass mowing, and leaf removal with different seasons. In the same year, Yarbo raised $3.45 million on Kickstarter, a North American crowdfunding platform, making it the company with the highest crowdfunding amount in the global consumer robotics track at that time.

"On May 15 this year, we opened the global pre-sale of new products in 2024, and the number of locked orders in Yarbo was close to 100 million yuan within one month of its launch, and it won more than 2 million US dollars on the day of the official sale, which was very popular." Candicee, a partner at Yarbo Hanyang Technology Markets, said. In June, Yarbo Garden Robot entered Europe and was unveiled at the 2024 Outdoor Products and Gardening Exhibition in Cologne, Germany (spoga+gafa).

Visitors visit the Yarbo booth at the Spoga+Gafa exhibition in Germany

"Our robot products are mainly for middle-class families in Europe and the United States." Candicee told the Xiaguang Society. "Unlike in China, when snow and ice accumulate on the sidewalk in front of the door after snow falls in North America, it is the responsibility of every household or business to clean up in a timely manner, otherwise they may face legal penalties. The emergence of Yarbo has solved this problem for many families, and will also help their neighbors clear the snow. As a result, some families see Yarbo as an emotional member. ”

In the courtyard economy, swimming pools are also a scene with great potential. There are 10.7 million swimming pools in the United States, of which 10.4 million are privately owned. Swimming pools are generally thoroughly cleaned every two weeks. Therefore, it is a rigid need.

In the past, although there were pool cleaning equipment, most of them had to drag a long line and were operated by people, which was quite inconvenient. Now this scene is beginning to be crowded with consumer-level robot manufacturers.

In 2023, the total sales of Amazon United States pool robots will reach 330 million US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 23.5%; Among the top 10 best-selling products in this category, 5 are from China; Even among the top 10 brands in the sales of cableless pool robots, 7 are from China. Half of these companies are from Shenzhen.

Among them, at the top of the list is Shenzhen enterprise Yuanding Intelligence. As early as 2019, Yuanding Intelligent launched a wireless pool robot, which cuts into courtyards and outdoor scenes through pool robots + energy storage. After it was launched on Amazon in September 2020, Aiper's total sales have reached 38,000 units, with total sales reaching $14 million, and the search popularity has even surpassed that of Dolphin, an overseas pool cleaning robot giant, becoming the hottest pool cleaning robot brand.

In addition to Yuanding Intelligence, there are also domestic swimming pool robots, as well as Tianjin's Wangyuan Intelligence, Suzhou's Xingmai Innovation, and Shenzhen's Siaotuo, Dejing Intelligence, Mulin Intelligence and other start-up pool robot companies. In terms of quantity, Shenzhen is almost the city with the most swimming pool robot startups.

From lawn mowing robots to snow removal robots to swimming pool robots, it can be said that Shenzhen robot companies are contracting the backyard of overseas middle class.

Ten years ago, Shenzhen was most proud of the 3C electronics industry.

Nearly 90% of the world's electronic products are distributed here. In particular, Huaqiang Electronics Market is known as the largest electronic product distribution center in Asia. There is even such a description in the market: "Shenzhen Huaqiangbei sneezes, and the national electronic product market has to catch a cold." Even the stall owners of many Southeast Asian electronic product markets and scenic night markets have traveled thousands of miles to Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen to buy goods.

But today, if you go to Huaqiangbei, although there are still a large number of electronic product stalls, high-tech products such as drones, 3D printers, and intelligent robots have also begun to dazzle.

Shenzhen Elephant Robot is a robot company that came out of Huaqiangbei. Elephant Robotics products are lightweight collaborative robots for service-oriented scenarios, as well as quadruped robots. Previously, Elephant Robot released the world's first bionic pet cat "MarsCat" (Mars Cat) at the United States CES exhibition, which was very popular with overseas young people.

The changes of Huaqiangbei are a microcosm of Shenzhen's industrial changes.

In 2009, Shenzhen established the first robot association in China - Shenzhen Robot Association. Bi Yalei, director of the Innovation and Development Division of the Shenzhen Advanced Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and secretary-general of the Shenzhen Robotics Association, once recalled that the Chinese Academy of Sciences had made more than 100 robot demonstration prototypes, but there was no platform to display, until the 2007 Hi-Tech Fair, the first time to show these robot prototypes to enterprises and the public, to many enterprises to bring inspiration. Since then, every year the Hi-Tech Fair has a free new achievement robot exhibition area, and in 2009, it established the Shenzhen Robot Industry Alliance with more than 20 of them.

The development of China's robot industry has entered the fast lane after 2015. In 2015, the state defined the robot industry standard. Since then, a number of robot companies have emerged in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities.

Among them, Beijing and Shanghai respectively focus on the intelligent robot industry and industrial robot applications, Shenzhen mainly builds service robot clusters, and Dongguan focuses on core robot components. In addition, in recent years, Suzhou has also brought together a number of well-known robot companies at home and abroad represented by sweeping robots and lawn mowers by virtue of the manufacturing industry foundation.

It was also around 2015 that Shenzhen's robot industry ushered in a big explosion - Hanyang Technology was established in 2015, Pudu Robot, Songling Robot, and Elephant Robot were established in 2016, and UBTECH, which just became the "first share of humanoid robots" at the end of last year, was established in 2012.

By 2022, the total output value of Shenzhen's robot industry chain has reached 164.4 billion yuan, an increase of 3.9% over the previous year; The number of enterprises in the robot industry reached 1,018, an increase of 7.68% over the previous year. In 2023, the total output value of Shenzhen's robot industry chain has risen to 179.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8.7%. The growth rate is very obvious.

Among them, the output value of industrial robots was 110.8 billion yuan, accounting for 61.7%; and 38.3% for non-industrial robots. However, an obvious trend is that the non-industrial robot industry has stabilized and rebounded, and the growth rate is also significantly higher than that of industrial robots.

From the perspective of the proportion of subdivisions, service robots are still an important component of the output value of non-industrial robots in Shenzhen. In 2023, the output value of service robots will account for 49.44%, special robots will account for 16.65%, logistics robots will account for 13.83%, educational robots will account for 6.36%, and medical robots will account for 6.23%.

Service robots are becoming the new business card of Shenzhen's industry.

The reason for the formation of such industrial advantages is that Shenzhen has a complete robot industry chain and corresponding support links, and is one of the cities with the most complete robot industry chain in China. Bi Yalei once said that Shenzhen is already the world's electronics manufacturing center, after more than 40 years of development, the industrial chain has formed a closed loop. In addition, Shenzhen itself is a national innovative city, and the whole atmosphere of innovation is strong and there are many innovative talents. With the blessing of these two backgrounds, Shenzhen's robot industry has developed and grown here.

Taking Hanyang Technology as an example, the demand for snow removal and other needs faced by its robots is more likely to occur in the northern snow area, while Shenzhen has a subtropical monsoon climate, with the lowest average temperature of the year in January of 15°C, and there is not a single snowflake throughout the year. However, in the end, it still chose to settle in Shenzhen, mainly because of its strong innovation atmosphere, complete industrial facilities and developed venture capital capital market. As for the snow, all you need to do is build a snow bank - in Hanyang Technology, there are two separate snow resorts, and there are also snow removal experimental areas in Mohe and Harbin in the northeast, Alaska in United States, Chicago, New York and other places.

Robots in snow removal

From the perspective of the government, as an important town in China's and even the world's robot industry, Shenzhen is focusing on the development of robots as a future industry and accelerating the creation of a globally competitive innovation capital. In 2022, Shenzhen will once again elevate the "industrial city, manufacturing city" to an unprecedented new height, and release a number of documents to plan the layout of "20+8" industrial clusters, pointing to trillion-level strategic emerging industries and future industries, including intelligent robots, as well as networks and communications, semiconductors and integrated circuits, ultra-high-definition video displays, intelligent terminals, intelligent sensors, software and information services in the upstream of its industry.

In terms of robot classification, industrial robots and non-industrial robots (the most important of which are service robots) are the most commonly used classification methods.

Industrial robots are usually used in industrial, manufacturing and other scenarios to replace human work in a certain link and improve work efficiency. In fact, since 2013, China has maintained its position as the world's largest industrial robot market for a long time. Therefore, the domestic industrial robot market has become a red sea as early as 2018.

The service robot is mainly for home and commercial two types of large scenes, of which the household includes indoor sweeping, education, companionship, etc., and the outdoor is the courtyard weeding, snow clearing, pool cleaning and other types of robots.

As mentioned above, Europe and the United States account for more than 70% of the global garden distribution. Therefore, robot companies oriented to courtyard service scenarios must look outward and go overseas to win the European and American markets.

When Hanyang Technology was established, it focused on the scene of courtyard snow removal. Its founder, Huang Yang, visited North America in the early years and found that the local people needed snow removal and yard maintenance in winter, so he saw the courtyard robot market. In 2021, Hanyang Technology launched the world's first intelligent home snowplowing robot, the beta version of the Snowbot S1, and the following year, it launched Yarbo, a courtyard intelligent robot product that integrates functional modules such as mowing grass and blowing leaves, and debuted on the Kickstarter platform, with a crowdfunding amount of more than $1 million within one hour of launch.

Therefore, so far, Hanyang Technology's products are mainly sold to the European and American markets.

Another lawn mowing robot company from Shenzhen, Laifei Technology, also launched its intelligent weeding robot, Novabot, in 2021 and launched it in the North American market through a crowdfunding platform. Weng Yulai, founder and CEO of Laifei Intelligence, once said that the domestic lawn mowing market is more about parks and stadiums, and if you do it in China, you have to cut the business market, while household lawn mowing robots are basically aimed at Europe, America and Australia and other countries, and the market is overseas.

And the demand for overseas courtyard markets is still growing rapidly. Weng Yulai believes that the current lawn mowing robot is like the sweeping robot 10 years ago, "First, weeding and cleaning, like cleaning, are very large markets and the demand is clear; Second, there is a difference between indoor and outdoor technical solutions, and single-line lidar can be used in the indoor building environment, so the sweeping robot is more intelligent, and the outdoor environment is complex, resulting in a truly intelligent lawn mower robot that has only begun to be made now; Third, from the perspective of technical process, with the intelligent navigation of sweeping robots, navigation has led to the improvement of other capabilities, and hardware innovation has also begun, which can give this industry more links to deal with. ”

This has also attracted the emergence of many new enterprises, such as Hesenburg, which was established in Shenzhen in 2022, focuses on European and American courtyard scenes, in addition to providing lawn mowing functions, it also provides users with functions such as leaf blowing, edge mowing, cleaning and sprinkler irrigation through detachable modules; In September 2021, Nine Robotics also launched the borderless intelligent lawn mower robot Navimow, and aimed at the back garden of European and American families.

As well as Shenzhen's swimming pool robot companies, they were also oriented to the North American market when they were established.

Take Yuanding Intelligence, a swimming pool robot company, as an example. Founded in 2015, Yuanding Intelligent entered the track of wireless speakers and portable energy storage in the early years, but the effect was not eye-catching. In 2019, Yuanding Intelligent entered the courtyard track and launched the wireless pool robot brand Aiper. Since then, it has achieved outstanding results in a short period of time: in the past three years, it has achieved financing of more than 75 million US dollars, annual cumulative shipments of more than 1 million units, and more than 7,000 offline stores, becoming the first brand in China and the top three in the world in terms of pool robot shipments.

In addition to Yuanding Intelligence, some start-up companies have also joined in. In November 2022, Genkinno, a Shenzhen-based company, completed a multi-million dollar angel round of financing, which is aimed at European and American courtyard scenes to create a new pool cleaning robot.

Entering 2023, the "emergence of intelligence" brought by large models has also attracted much attention for humanoid robots (embodied intelligence). UBTECH is one of the most typical representatives in the field of humanoid robots.

At present, UBTECH is the largest supplier of educational intelligent robot products and solutions in China, accounting for more than 20% of the market share. Overseas, its customers are mainly from the United States, Korea, the United Arab Emirates and Thailand. According to its financial report, from 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, overseas revenue will be 57 million yuan, 63 million yuan, 130 million yuan, and 230 million yuan respectively, and the proportion of total revenue will also rise from 7.8% to 21.8%. It can be seen that overseas is supporting a new space for UBTECH's business growth.

For Shenzhen's service robot industry, going to sea is like a baptism. It not only drives the growth of the performance and revenue of Shenzhen robot enterprises, but also brings brand building.

On July 11 this year, at the WAVE2024 Brand Globalization Conference held by Xiaguang Society, Candicee, a partner of Hanyang Technology Market, elaborated on Yarbo's idea of brand building overseas. She said that the team will communicate with users in various ways to increase the emotional connection of these multi-functional garden robots beyond their functions.

Another example is Yuanding Intelligence. In the field of swimming pool cleaning robots, the star enterprise in the past was Wangyuan Technology located in Tianjin. In 2021, its shipments in the global private pool cleaning robot market accounted for about 14%, ranking third in the world, and it was the largest company in the field of pool cleaning robot manufacturers in China, accounting for 80.90% at one time. However, in the past, Wangyuan Technology was mainly an OEM model. After the launch of the Aiper brand, Yuanding Intelligent has counterattacked and become one of the most favored pool robot brands among overseas consumers.

Even today's Huaqiangbei is also full of international style - here, you can see overseas merchants from all over the world at almost any time, even some salespeople with low academic qualifications, they can calmly communicate with overseas merchants with translation equipment. According to media reports, after 2023, whether it is a hotel or a shopping mall in Shenzhen, buyers from overseas are returning in a big way, rushing to Huaqiang Electronics World shopping malls and various professional exhibitions with orders and procurement needs. Correspondingly, Chinese brands are becoming increasingly popular overseas, with more than 70% of overseas consumers open to more than 90% of Chinese brands.

In recent years, under the haze of doubts about the commercialization ability of intelligent robots in China, going to sea has allowed Shenzhen's robot industry to earn the first pot of gold and break the curse of the difficulty of commercialization of the robot industry.

In fact, now not only Shenzhen's service robot companies, but also domestic AI companies, industrial robots, and commercial robot companies including Beijing and Shanghai are exploring going overseas to complete the closed loop of commercialization. For example, AI companies SenseTime and Terminus have targeted the Middle East market, and Megvii has set an eye on the Japan market; Keenon Intelligent's service robots are sold to overseas developed markets such as United States, Europe, Japan, and Korea, while Pudu Technology's robots are sold to markets in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.

For Shenzhen, the first-mover advantage in overseas markets is weakening, and the robot industry is also moving towards a long slope and thick snow.

Different from the electronics industry in the past, the iteration and innovation requirements of intelligent industries such as robots are very strong, especially after the large model fever, the global intelligent industry can be described as changing with each passing day, which tests the accumulation ability of the robot industry in the field of basic research.

According to the map of the domestic AI industry, Beijing focuses on basic research, while Shanghai focuses on applied research and development. And Shenzhen's label in terms of AI is not obvious. According to the analysis report of the top 500 global AI innovation cities released by AMiner and Zhipu Research, the AI innovation city index of Beijing and Shanghai is higher than that of Shenzhen.

In addition, according to the data of the China New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategy Research Institute, Shenzhen's AI competitiveness enterprise ability, capital environment, international openness, link ability and government responsiveness all rank first, but the academic ecology ranks ninth. This also means that basic research and original capabilities are a major shortcoming restricting the development of artificial intelligence in Shenzhen.

The good news is that from the government to the industry, they are making up for this shortcoming. On April 16 this year, the Guangdong Embodied Intelligent Robot Innovation Center (hereinafter referred to as the "Innovation Center") was officially launched in Nanshan, Shenzhen, with the main goal of bringing together the academic, research and industrial resources of Guangdong Province in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics, building an industrial service platform, and promoting the formation of an independent and controllable embodied intelligent robot industry cluster; A month later, on May 21, the Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Cross-modal Cognitive Computing was also unveiled at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, which will aim at the international frontier, carry out original research work, and promote the implementation of research.

The implementation of these laboratories not only enhances Shenzhen's capabilities in the field of basic research in artificial intelligence, but also cultivates relevant talents for the entire industry.

In addition to industrial research, industry breakthrough is also an indispensable lesson. Xie Pengcun, chairman of Biyi Micro, talked about the current situation of Shenzhen's industrial chain and said that Shenzhen's electronic information industry is still biased towards the middle and lower reaches of the industrial chain, although the sense of innovation is strong, the competitive barriers still need to be strengthened, and we should guide and encourage everyone to expand to the middle and upper reaches according to the shortage of the industrial chain.

Although Huawei, DJI and other leading technology companies have driven the scientific and technological innovation of the whole Shenzhen in smart hardware, the chip industry and key parts manufacturing upstream are still overcoming difficulties. This is not only a problem for Shenzhen, but also a key battle for the entire Chinese manufacturing industry to leapfrog to the high-end.

More than 40 years ago, the reform and opening up made Shenzhen from a coastal fishing village to the center of the global electronics industry, and enjoyed the first wave of dividends of the globalization of Chinese enterprises; Today, the restructuring of the global industrial chain has once again triggered a globalization with the rise of emerging markets, and the globalization of Chinese enterprises is going deeper and higher quality.

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