On July 6, 2026, a forklift robot rolled off the line and Hikrobot declared its cumulative mobile-robot output across all categories had passed 200,000 units. Having reached 100,000 in May 2024, the company needed only two years for the second hundred thousand. The Mobile Robot Industry Alliance ranks Hikrobot number one globally by mobile-robot market share for 2025, a marker of how fast Chinese mobile robotics has moved from demos to volume.
Scale like this is the sum of long bets on technology, product, scenario and standards, not just capacity. Hikrobot’s path runs from early product lines (latent, forklift, omnidirectional forklift) to a safety controller with the world’s first SIL3 certificate, an omnidirectional forklift with China’s first full-directive CE mark, and a fourth-generation ‘smart base’ architecture, a clear climb from ‘can move’ to ‘safe, stable and schedulable in complex plants’.
Where it is already deployed
By April 2026 Hikrobot had served over 20,000 customers across more than 1,000 scenarios in autos, 3C electronics, solar, lithium, retail, pharma, tobacco and apparel. In automotive, it placed over 2,000 mobile robots across FAW-Toyota plants, the first single auto plant above 1,000 units, and 687 at once at Changan’s smart factory, raising efficiency 20 per cent and cutting line cost 20 per cent. In lithium it has shipped over 10,000 units across 500-plus projects. Its overseas references already include Singapore’s YCH Group and Watsons, showing the stack travels.
The Tonglu campus, over 200 mu, runs mobile robots, machine vision and joint robots in deep coordination, producing 75,000 mobile robots, 2 million vision units and 20,000 joint robots a year. The lesson for European manufacturers is that Chinese industrial-robotics vendors have moved past pilots into car-factory-scale deployment and export, turning ‘robot builds robot’ from lab demo into a repeatable production loop.
Read the original report (in Chinese)
*Translated and adapted from LeiPhone (https://www.leiphone.com/category/robot/V0sjtRJAoZdt3K8y.html).*