China's grip on the collaborative-robot market is now the single most important fact in cobot pricing — and the numbers tell a more interesting story than "China is winning." It ships the most units, but it does not earn the most money, and the gap between those two facts is where the buying insight lives. Here is the market by the numbers, with the sources laid out so you can check every figure.
Units: China now ships the majority
The headline is unambiguous. Per Interact Analysis, China has accounted for more than half of global cobot shipments since 2023. Trade coverage of the same data traces the arc: China's shipment share rose from roughly 29% in 2018 to about 55% in 2025, and is forecast to pass 61% by 2030 (per DC Velocity's reporting of Interact Analysis figures). Interact Analysis separately projects China alone could reach 70,000 cobot units a year by 2029.
This is not a fluke of one slow year. The broader market is growing fast — Interact Analysis forecasts global cobot shipments to compound at about 17.3% a year from 2025 to 2030, with 2026 expected to be the single strongest growth year at roughly 24%. China is taking a rising share of a rising market.
Revenue: a very different picture
Here is the number that reframes everything. While China ships the majority of units, its revenue share sits near 35% in 2025, forecast to rise to about 42.4% by 2030 (China revenue growing ~17.8% a year versus ~11% for the rest of the world, per trade coverage of Interact Analysis). So China moves ~55% of the boxes but collects ~35% of the dollars.
That split is not a rounding error — it is a pricing signal, and we can quantify it.
The derived number: China's cobots sell for under half the global average
Take the 2025 figures at face value — China ~55% of units and ~35% of revenue, leaving the rest of the world ~45% of units and ~65% of revenue — and the implied average selling prices fall out directly:
| Region (2025) | Unit share | Revenue share | Implied relative ASP |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | ~55% | ~35% | 0.35 / 0.55 = 0.64 |
| Rest of world | ~45% | ~65% | 0.65 / 0.45 = 1.44 |
Divide the two (0.64 / 1.44) and you get ~0.44 — meaning a Chinese cobot sells, on average, for roughly 44% of the price of the average non-Chinese cobot. Call it "under half." This is a derived, illustrative figure, not a surveyed price — it inherits any error in the underlying share numbers and mixes different product tiers — but the direction is robust and it matches on-the-ground pricing: Chinese cobots are routinely reported at 30–70% under Western and Japanese equivalents, a spread we've seen hold up in specific model comparisons like Universal Robots vs. the Chinese cobots.
The vendor board
Market share by revenue still has a Western brand on top, but the podium is turning Chinese. Universal Robots leads the global market in 2026 at roughly 15% share; behind it, China's Dobot, AUBO and JAKA take three of the top four positions. That is the revenue paradox in miniature: the single most valuable brand is Danish, but the volume base underneath it is increasingly Chinese — which is exactly what a 55%-units / 35%-revenue split predicts.
Where the units go inside China
The demand mix also differs from the West. Globally, automotive is the biggest cobot end-industry; inside China, electronics leads — roughly one-third of all cobots sold in China in 2023 went into electronics (Interact Analysis). For buyers, that concentration is why Chinese cobots are often tuned and priced for high-mix electronics assembly and light handling rather than heavy automotive spot-welding cells.
What the numbers mean if you're buying
Three takeaways fall out of the data:
- The discount is real and structural, not a promotion. A market-wide ~44% implied ASP gap is not a sale that ends next quarter; it reflects a genuinely lower-cost production base. Budgeting a Chinese cobot at roughly half a Western equivalent is defensible — see the model-level numbers in our AUBO and JAKA price guides.
- Cheaper hardware ≠ cheaper deployment. The arm is 50–70% of a cell's cost; a 44%-cheaper arm does not make the tooling, vision, integration and training 44% cheaper. The all-in gap is narrower than the sticker gap.
- Support and tariffs close part of the spread. In the US, Section 301 duties and thinner local service networks erode some of the advantage. The revenue-share data shows Chinese vendors still under-monetize per unit even after those frictions — which is precisely why the units keep shifting east.
If you're pricing a cobot cell in 2026, start from the collaborative robot category and read the share data as a floor on how aggressive Chinese quotes can be — the market average says they have room to be very aggressive indeed.
Sources
- Interact Analysis — Global collaborative robot shipment growth drops (China >50% of shipments since 2023; ~70,000 units by 2029; electronics ~1/3 of China sales in 2023)
- Interact Analysis — Strong 17.3% growth forecast for collaborative robot shipments 2025–30
- DC Velocity — Cobot shipments to rise more than 17% by 2030; China maintains market dominance (shipment-share arc; revenue-share and vendor-ranking figures)
