A Chinese yard-robot company just made the case that lidar, not RTK, is the profitable path for robotic mowers — and that the real competition is no longer the sensor, but the shelf.
Naisilao Intelligent Technology, whose brands MOVA and NexLawn sell lidar mowers, paused an RTK prototype back in 2022 because satellite signals drop under trees and eaves. Instead it spent nine months building delivery robots, then restarted the mower once Livox’s Mid-360 hybrid-solid-state lidar dropped to 3,999 yuan in January 2023 and made the category viable.
President Qin Ling says the first-generation lidar cost about 2,000 yuan to build and sold overseas for 1,999 euros — profitable from day one. The edge is returns: under 3 per cent versus roughly 10 per cent for RTK rivals, because a lidar bot finds its way home instead of stalling in the yard.
Scale followed. As of May 2026 cumulative shipments passed 500,000 units; in April it led Germany, Poland and Italy with over 35 per cent share, and in May its MOVA LiDAX Ultra topped Amazon US Best Sellers. Frost & Sullivan ranks it number one in both lidar-mower and AI binocular-vision mower sales over the trailing year.
Naisilao splits brands by channel — MOVA for mass-market DIY stores like Bauhaus and Leroy Merlin, NexLawn for high-end dealers — and is pushing UltraTrim, a built-in arm that cuts edge grass to 3-5cm versus the industry’s 10cm. Qin Ling’s lesson: the hard part was never the sensor, it was turning a complex technology into a quiet, repeatable business.
Original report: Leiphone.
Translated and adapted from Leiphone (leiphone.com).