FANUC robot orders rise 21% as China and Europe pick up, and its CRX cobot draws more than 1,000 physical AI orders after iREX

FANUC Corp. said on January 26, 2026 that orders at its robot division rose 20.9% from a year earlier to ¥98.8 billion in the three months to December 31, the third quarter of its fiscal year, as customers in China and Europe stepped up spending. Robot sales rose 21.9% to ¥96.6 billion, which made the division about 45% of group sales of ¥215.7 billion in the quarter, according to the company's results materials.

For the nine months to December, the Yamanashi-based company reported net sales of ¥623.3 billion, up 6.5%, and operating profit of ¥127.7 billion, up 15.6%. Profit attributable to owners rose 13.7% to ¥116.9 billion, or ¥125.23 per share. The nine-month operating margin was 20.5%, 1.6 percentage points higher than a year earlier. In the third quarter alone, operating profit rose 19.6% year on year to ¥41.7 billion but fell 4.1% from the second quarter, leaving a quarterly margin of 19.3%.

FANUC raised its forecast for the year to March 31, 2026 to net sales of ¥840.7 billion from ¥818.8 billion, an increase of ¥21.9 billion. It cut its operating profit forecast to ¥172.9 billion from ¥175.9 billion and nudged its net profit forecast up to ¥158.0 billion from ¥157.3 billion. In its investor Q&A the company tied the lower profit outlook to unrealized profits, citing the weak yen's effect on the valuation of inventory held overseas. It assumes rates of ¥145 to the dollar and ¥170 to the euro for the fourth quarter, against nine-month averages of ¥148.74 and ¥171.83.

The regional figures, which cover all divisions, show where the demand came from. Group orders from China rose 16.4% to ¥57.7 billion and sales there climbed 22.7% to ¥57.9 billion. Orders from Europe rose 23.4% to ¥40.1 billion, and orders from the Americas rose 10.5% to ¥59.0 billion. Japan orders rose 5.9% to ¥29.2 billion, while orders from the rest of Asia fell 10.0% to ¥32.4 billion. FANUC told analysts that electric vehicle and IT demand in China was robust, that US demand was beginning to emerge after a time lag, and that the European market had finally hit bottom and was improving moderately.

The headline for the robot business was physical AI. FANUC said that following iREX, the International Robot Exhibition held at Tokyo Big Sight from December 3 to 6, 2025, it had already received orders for more than 1,000 CRX robots in connection with physical AI, with further inquiries covering several thousand units under way. At the show it exhibited 63 robots, demonstrated four CRX based physical AI systems built with NVIDIA, and promoted an open platform that uses ROS for PC-based control. It said sales leads from the show reached 1.4 times the level of fiscal 2023, a record, and pointed to strong interest from shipbuilders.

The other businesses were mixed. Factory automation, FANUC's CNC and servo business, posted sales of ¥49.8 billion, up 3.7%, with orders up 15.6% to ¥54.7 billion. The Robomachine division, which sells machining centres and injection moulding machines, saw sales fall 8.0% to ¥33.0 billion and orders drop 20.6% to ¥30.8 billion. Service sales rose 7.2% to ¥36.3 billion.

FANUC, founded in 1972, makes CNC controls, servo motors and industrial robots, and is financed almost entirely by equity. Its equity ratio stood at 88.7% on December 31, on total assets of ¥2.02 trillion. In the first nine months it spent ¥34.6 billion on capital investment and ¥15.5 billion on research and development.

The comparison with its domestic rival is instructive. Yaskawa Electric reported on January 9 that revenue in its robotics segment rose 7.3% to ¥183.0 billion in the nine months to November 30, while segment operating profit slipped 3.9% to ¥15.5 billion. Yaskawa's robotics revenue for September to November was ¥63.8 billion, and it kept its full-year forecast of ¥525.0 billion in revenue and ¥48.0 billion in operating profit. Teradyne, the US owner of collaborative robot maker Universal Robots, reported robotics revenue of $89 million for October to December.

The CRX line is FANUC's family of collaborative robots, designed to work next to people without safety fencing and to be set up by staff who are not robot programmers. Physical AI, in the industry's usage, means letting AI models that perceive a scene and plan a task drive the robot directly. By opening its controllers to ROS and PC-based software, FANUC lets outside AI developers, including partners using NVIDIA hardware, connect perception and planning software to its arms without rewriting the motion layer.

The quarter suggests robot demand is turning upward, led by China and with Europe following. It also shows FANUC trying to recast its cobot as the default body for AI software, a market that start-ups building humanoids and robot foundation models are also chasing.

There are caveats. The company raised its sales outlook but cut operating profit, and quarterly operating profit fell from the second quarter. China accounted for 26.8% of group sales in the quarter, which leaves results exposed to Chinese capital spending. Robomachine orders fell by a fifth. And 1,000 CRX orders is a meaningful signal of interest but modest against a robot division that books close to ¥100 billion a quarter; FANUC has not disclosed the value of those orders.

Investors will look for the full-year results after the fiscal year closes on March 31, for whether the several thousand CRX inquiries turn into orders, and for Yaskawa's own full-year results for the year to February 28.