China made 773,074 industrial robots in 2025, up 28%, while service robot growth faded into 2026

China's factories turned out 773,074 industrial robots in 2025, 28.0% more than a year earlier on a comparable basis, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which confirmed the figure in its annual statistical communique published on 28 February 2026. Output of service robots reached 18,581,081 sets, an increase of 16.1%, the bureau said.

The robot numbers stood out against the wider economy. The NBS put 2025 gross domestic product at 140,187.9 billion yuan, up 5.0%, with value added at industrial enterprises above designated size up 5.9%, high technology manufacturing up 9.4% and equipment manufacturing up 9.2%. Among the new industrial products the bureau tracks, industrial robots grew faster than new energy vehicles, whose output rose 25.1% to 16.524 million units, and integrated circuits, which rose 10.9% to 484.28 billion pieces. Only 3D printing equipment, up 52.5% to 5.211 million units, grew faster in the communique's list.

Momentum held into the end of the year. In its December release on 19 January 2026, the NBS reported December industrial robot output of 90,116 sets, up 14.7% from a year earlier, and December service robot output of 1,564,018 sets, up 4.6%. At a press conference the same day, NBS commissioner Kang Yi cited 28% growth in industrial robots and 37.3% growth in civilian drones as evidence of what Beijing calls new quality productive forces. He said humanoid robots had moved from the Spring Festival Gala stage to robot sports events and were now entering factories in organised units.

The first official reading for 2026 pointed in two directions. The NBS said on 16 March that industrial robot output in January and February combined reached 143,608 sets, up 31.1%, while service robot output was 2,547,480 sets, up just 1.0%. Industrial value added grew 6.3% in the period and high technology manufacturing 13.1%. Sun Xiao, chief statistician of the bureau's industry department, said output of industrial control computers, 3D printing equipment and industrial robots rose 90.0%, 54.1% and 31.1% respectively, and credited equipment upgrades and faster robot production for 8.9% growth in general equipment manufacturing.

The headline totals need careful handling. The 2024 communique reported industrial robot output of 556,000 sets, up 14.2%, and service robot output of 10.519 million sets, up 15.6%. Dividing the 2025 totals by those 2024 totals would suggest growth of about 39% for industrial robots and about 77% for service robots, far above the official rates. The NBS explains in its release notes that the population of enterprises above designated size changes every year, so it calculates year on year growth against prior year data for a set of companies kept as close as possible to the current one. The published growth rates, not the ratio of the two totals, are the like for like measure.

The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) offers the closest international yardstick, although it counts installations rather than production. Its World Robotics 2025 report, released on 25 September 2025, said 542,000 industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2024, of which 295,000, or 54%, went into China, the highest annual total on record. Chinese suppliers held 57% of their home market in 2024, up from about 28% a decade earlier, the IFR said. Installations fell in every other large market, by 4% to 44,500 units in Japan, by 9% to 34,200 in the United States, by 3% to 30,600 in South Korea and by 5% to 26,982 in Germany.

The NBS series does not break output down by robot type, payload, price or destination, and the bureau does not publish a separate line for humanoid robots. That leaves open how much of the 2025 increase came from conventional articulated arms for automotive and electronics lines, how much from lighter collaborative arms, and how much from units shipped abroad. The IFR count of 295,000 installations in China in 2024 is well below the NBS output figure for the same year, a gap the two bodies' different definitions and coverage do not allow outsiders to reconcile line by line.

The divergence inside the 2026 data is the more immediate question. Service robots, a category that spans cleaning machines, delivery and reception robots and consumer devices, grew 23.3% in 2023, 15.6% in 2024 and 16.1% in 2025 according to successive communiques, before slowing to 1.0% in the first two months of 2026 and 4.6% in December 2025. The NBS combines January and February to smooth the Spring Festival holiday, which fell on 17 February in 2026, so a single two month reading may still be distorted.

The next checkpoints are the NBS release for March and the first quarter, scheduled for mid April, and monthly releases thereafter, followed by the IFR's World Robotics 2026 report, which the federation normally publishes in September.