Midea
Location: Foshan, Guangdong
Subsidiaries/Affiliates: KUKA, State Key Laboratory for High-end Heavy-duty Robots
Summary: Midea is a home appliance manufacturer and is not itself a robotics company. However, Midea owns 100% of KUKA, a German robotics company that controls around 6% of the global market share for industrial robots and supplies robots used by both Chinese and foreign manufacturers in automotive, electronics, aerospace, and healthcare industries. No Chinese industrial robotics firms have over 1% global market share, since most industrial robots continue to be made by Japanese or European companies. Midea has pledged to invest $8.7 billion in Kuka until 2029, with a focus on embodied AI, and it has established a “stat key lab” to study high-end heavy-duty robots and an innovation center dedicated to humanoid robots. Midea and KUKA have also developed a first humanoid robot for the first time that will be deployed to assembly lines in addition to normal industrial robots.
Estun Automation
Location: Nanjing, Jiangsu
Subsidiaries/Affiliates: Estun Robotics
Summary: Since Kuka’s robots are still partly designed and made in Europe, Estun Robotics is considered to be the leading “Chinese” robotics company that is entirely based in China. In 2025, Estun became the first Chinese robotics company to secure more market share in the Chinese industrial robotics market than any other company, after decades of reliance on foreign imports mostly from Japan. Estun Automation sells “smart manufacturing systems” including both general-purpose and specialized robots designed for tasks like arc welding, cleaning, bending, stamping, and palletizing, along with application-specific software. As of 2025, around a third of Estun’s revenues were from outside China, and it operates 75 service locations worldwide with manufacturing bases in Germany and a base planned in Poland.
Agibot
Location: Shanghai
Subsidiaries/Affiliates: N/A
Summary: While Unitree and Tesla are perhaps more high-profile in the humanoid robotics space, Agibot has sold over 15,000 humanoid robots as of June 2026, and it has a global market share of around 39%. Thus, Agibot is arguably the world’s leader in humanoid robotics, at least by popularity. Its humanoid robots are not meant for dancing or for research, but rather are made for practical industrial applications, especially in terms of semiconductor production, auto components, logistics and warehousing, and commercial services. They can perform high precision tasks that are typically performed by humans. After entering into mass production, over 80% of revenue has been derived from China, but the company hopes to export its robots to factories around the world as humanoid robots become more popular.
