What is Doosan Robotics? The Korean cobot maker now earns half its sales from US packaging cells, explained in numbers

Doosan Robotics booked KRW 32.97bn of revenue in the first six months of 2026, 99.97% of everything it sold in 2025. On the surface that is a turnaround for the Doosan group's collaborative-robot maker. Underneath, it is a change of business. More than half of the first-half sales, 53% by the company's own count, came from automation solutions in North America, built by a Pennsylvania integrator Doosan bought a year ago, rather than from the cobot arms that made its name.

That shift matters for anyone trying to value the company or to understand where Korea's physical-AI money is going. This explainer sets out what Doosan Robotics makes, how its numbers have moved since 2022, how it compares with rivals, and what its 2028 industrial humanoid plan depends on.

A cobot maker with 14 models and a shrinking arm business

Doosan Robotics was founded in 2015, launched its first cobot in 2018 and counts Doosan Corp. as its major shareholder. Its April 2026 investor presentation lists 14 cobot models across payloads from about 5 kg to 30 kg, more than the line-ups it shows for Universal Robots, FANUC or Techman, and more than 100 sales channels, with over 60% of revenue earned outside Korea. Around the arms it sells Dart-Suite software and turnkey applications for palletising, welding, machine tending and food service.

The arm business has been shrinking. Audited revenue peaked at KRW 53.04bn in 2023, fell to KRW 46.83bn in 2024 and to KRW 32.98bn in 2025, a 37.8% drop in two years. The company told investors in March that North American demand for its arms fell about 50% in 2025 as US tariffs froze purchasing. Gross profit dropped from KRW 14.66bn to KRW 4.42bn over the same two years, so gross margin halved from 27.6% to 13.4%, while selling and administrative costs nearly doubled from KRW 33.83bn in 2023 to KRW 63.89bn.

Method: loss ratio = operating loss divided by revenue. H1 2026 combines the Q1 and Q2 preliminary releases.

The question this raises is where the 2026 rebound came from, if not from arms.

How a KRW 37bn purchase in Pennsylvania became half the company

In July 2025 Doosan Robotics agreed to buy 89.59% of ONExia, an Exton, Pennsylvania integrator of end-of-line packing and palletising cells, for KRW 37.41bn ($27.19m), according to its KRX filing; the deal closed on Sept 17, 2025. ONExia then absorbed Doosan's US sales arm and became Doosan Robotics Americas (DRA). In March 2026 the parent put a further $16.0m into it to expand its factory.

The Q2 2026 earnings release shows what that bought. Group revenue rose 290% year on year to KRW 17.67bn, which the company attributed to larger orders from key customers and ONExia's contribution. DRA's own sales rose 127% to $6.8m in the quarter, with end-of-line systems up about 130% to $4.8m and arms and other items at $2.0m. The company expects DRA sales to grow 50% in 2026. North America solutions accounted for 53% of first-half revenue, or roughly KRW 17.5bn by our arithmetic (0.53 times KRW 32.97bn).

There is a caution in the same slide. DRA's order backlog was $12.4m at the end of June, down from $14.9m at the end of 2025, though still well above $3.8m at the end of 2024. Integration revenue is lumpy and is booked project by project.

On disclosed figures Doosan out-sold Rainbow Robotics in the first half, KRW 32.97bn against KRW 21.38bn, but both are small next to Teradyne's Universal Robots and MiR unit, which reported $191m over the same six months, or Hong Kong-listed Dobot at RMB 492.2m for 2025. If the revenue is now coming from US integration, the next question is what it costs.

The losses are smaller, not small

The first-half operating loss was KRW 26.49bn, equal to 80.3% of revenue, against 180.3% in 2025. Net losses were KRW 9.17bn in Q1 and KRW 12.79bn in Q2. The balance sheet remains the company's main asset: KRW 252.4bn of cash at June 30, against KRW 50.0bn of debt that first appeared this year, leaving net cash of KRW 202.4bn and a liabilities-to-equity ratio of 34.2%.

MEKAWIRE number: at the first-half rate of operating loss, KRW 52.97bn a year, net cash covers about 3.8 years (202.4 divided by 52.97). Operating loss is not the same as cash burn, but it is the measure the company discloses quarterly.

The humanoid is mostly paid for by the state

Doosan Robotics said on April 29 that it will launch solutions on its Agentic Robot O/S in 2027 and an industrial humanoid in 2028, after talks with NVIDIA on linking that software to NVIDIA's simulation stack. On Oct 6 it said two projects it proposed to the trade ministry and KEIT had been selected, with R&D budgets of about KRW 98.9bn, KRW 68.1bn of it government funding (68.9%). One puts a Korean AI chip into new 5, 10 and 20 kg cobots and a two-armed industrial humanoid, with partners including AIDIN Robotics, aiming for standard products from 2031; the other automates nuclear-component welding for Doosan Enerbility. Five days earlier it named Kwon Young-min, head of Bobcat's hydraulics unit Doosan Mottrol since 2021, as chief executive.