China robot exports hit 35B yuan in 8 months, surgical robots up 273%
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-10-17
China exported robots worth 35.05 billion yuan to 171 countries in Jan–Aug 2026, per customs data, with Germany the top partner at 5.99B yuan (17.08%).
Highlights:
- Cleaning robots dominated at 24.63B yuan (70.25%), mostly to Europe (61.37% of the category); surgical robot exports jumped 272.92% YoY to 672M yuan; spraying and collaborative robots grew 70.82% and 49.31%; IC-factory handling robots fell 58.70%.
- Guangdong (14.7B) and Jiangsu (11.0B) together accounted for 73.25% of exports, driven by cleaning robots; Shanghai leads industrial and surgical robots (65.25% of national surgical exports); Zhejiang leads intelligent bionic robots at 61.09% of the newly counted category.
- Europe took 51.04% of total exports; adjusting for category-count changes, Vietnam — not Germany — was actually the largest trading partner, followed by India, the US and Brazil.
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