The world’s oldest consumer-electronics fair opened in Berlin on 4 September looking less like a gadget show and more like a parade of Chinese physical AI. Of roughly 2,000 exhibitors at IFA 2026, more than 932 came from mainland China, a number that tops 1,000 with Hong Kong and Taiwan firms included, close to half of the entire floor and a record for the fair. Mandarin was everywhere in the halls.
Humanoids own the floor
IFA Next, the fair’s innovation hall, saw the largest humanoid-robot showcase in IFA history, and the protagonists were Chinese. Unitree placed a fighting ring at its entrance; EngineAI’s full-size T800, 1.73 metres tall with 450 Nm of torque, performed rising-dragon punches, spinning kicks and rapid recovery, with European visitors visibly tempted to climb the barrier and spar. Agibot showed the A3 doing tai chi, the A2 writing calligraphy, and the G2 handling industrial materials. Evolution Robotics brought AI football with autonomous positioning, tackling and shooting. YuanDian showed Bridge, a humanoid priced from RMB 8,888, claimed as the world’s first RMB-10,000-class high-performance humanoid.
Pudu launched its PUDU D7 companion robot in Europe, winning an IFA innovation award. XPeng exhibited its Iron humanoid, though only as a static shell. Xiaomi’s CyberOne made its overseas debut and interacted with visitors. Home-appliance giants also demoed humanoids: Midea’s robot served popcorn, and Haier’s unloaded laundry and sorted fridge contents. Magic Atom, taking the industrial route, showed its Magic-VLA K02 embodied model with a claimed 92 per cent accuracy on complex tasks and under 5 per cent task interruption, while its robots folded clothes and taped boxes under real disruption.
Beyond humanoids: pools, lawns and companions
The robots were not all bipedal. Quadrupeds appeared from multiple vendors, including Hengzhi Future’s pet-like Sirius with integrated leg electronics. Cleanup robotics shifted hard toward European gardens: nearly every cleaning-robot maker parked a pool at its booth. Dreame’s A4 AWD PRO mower handles 42-degree slopes with zero-centimetre edge cutting, Anker’s Eufy S2 Max and MOVA’s AstraX added robotic arms, and NexLawn’s commercial AURION F115 covers up to 60,000 square metres with fleet coordination. Laundry, window and standard vacuum robots were largely incremental this year.
Companion and pet robots multiplied, from Tuya’s elderly-care companion Doova to AI pets with screen faces, plus an AI pocket pet that physically grows as it levels up. Exoskeletons are going consumer-grade: Kenqi’s pi6 main unit weighs just 980 grams and folds to the size of an umbrella.
AI appliances, glasses and the entry-point war
Home-appliance giants went all-in on AI scenes rather than AI features. Hisense unveiled an AI companion suite spanning kitchen and laundry; Midea’s SMART MASTER hub supports 140 languages with eight-metre far-field voice; TCL, Changhong and Haier each pushed AI-assisted appliances. Displays moved to RGB-Mini LED across the mainstream, with Hisense’s 116-inch UX2026 flagship reaching 43,008 control zones and 10,000 nits, while printed OLED waits for maturity.
AI hardware chased new entry points: Xiaomi’s 18 Fold appeared before its formal launch with the Xuanjie O3 chip, claimed as the first SoC to top 5 million in benchmark score; INMO’s GO3 translation glasses won two IFA awards; AI recorders, earbuds, memory bands, necklaces and even a smart calendar that reads fridge contents all crowded the floor. Camera makers Insta360 and DJI drew long queues, and desktop CNC and home-brewing tools courted the DIY crowd.
From selling products to defining categories
The through-line of the show was a shift in posture. Chinese companies are no longer exporting finished goods to be rebadged; they are defining new product categories at a European trade fair, from humanoid development platforms at RMB 8,888 to garden robots engineered around the European yard. Several exhibitors told the reporting team they now design from the product-definition stage around European regulation, local aesthetic preference and the specific layout of European homes and gardens, treating the region as a market to design for rather than a channel to ship into.
With AI spreading across consumer electronics and appliances, the fair’s century-long journey from radio exhibition to physical-AI stage was complete. The exhibitors making that transition possible were, overwhelmingly, Chinese.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Zhidx report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.zhidx.com/p/591012.html.