Correction — September 9, 2026: The earlier version confused the report year with the data year, described 2024 installations as a record, and assigned a forecast to the wrong year. Those statements have been removed. The figures below refer to IFR's World Robotics 2025 release and its 2024 reporting period.
Reported figures and their scope
| Measure | Reported figure | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Global industrial robot installations in 2024 | 542,000 | Annual additions; the second-highest annual figure |
| Industrial robots operating worldwide | 4.664 million | Installed stock, not annual sales |
| Installations in China in 2024 | 295,000 | Robots installed in China, irrespective of supplier nationality |
| China share of global installations | 54% | Share of installation location, not Chinese-brand revenue |
IFR's September 2025 release also gave forecasts of 575,000 installations in 2025 and more than 700,000 in 2028. These are forecasts made at publication, not observed results for those years. A future report may revise historical figures or projections.
What a buyer can infer
A large installation base can help identify where to look for integrators, spare-parts channels and application experience. It cannot establish which supplier will support a particular factory. Ask a shortlisted integrator for references covering your process, payload and local support region.
The China figure does not establish the market share of any brand. A robot made by a foreign manufacturer and installed at a Chinese plant contributes to Chinese installations. Conversely, a Chinese-brand robot exported elsewhere contributes to its destination's installation count. Treat claims about brand leadership as separate questions requiring a different dataset.
Use the numbers in a procurement brief
Record the publisher, release date, reporting year, geography and metric beside any number copied into a business case. A slide labelled simply “robot market” can accidentally combine revenue, shipments and installed stock. Keep industrial robots separate from service robots, drones and consumer robot vacuums.
For a purchase decision, specify the operation first: acceptable cycle time, part variation, uptime requirements, changeovers and support responsibilities. Compare suppliers using the same acceptance test. Overall market growth cannot validate the payback of an individual cell.
Explore the industrial robot directory and the robot deployment cost worksheet to turn a candidate system into a project-specific comparison. Calculator outputs are scenarios based on inputs, not predictions of realised savings.