Huawei has made a number of strikes lately that point out robotics turning into a much bigger precedence for the corporate. | Supply: Adobe Inventory
Huawei Applied sciences, a Shenzhen-based telecommunications supplier, final week invested 3 billion yuan (about $413 million) into its subsidiary Dongguan Jimu Equipment. The South China Morning Publish first reported this story. Huawei has not publicly disclosed the funding.
Huawei established Jimu in June 2023, when it registered the corporate with 870 million yuan in financing (about $121 million), in line with Huawei Central. Huawei mentioned Jimu’s enterprise scope consists of digital element manufacturing, engineering and technical analysis, the import and export of products together with know-how, experimental growth, and extra.
Jimu is led by Li Jianguo, an govt director at Huawei, and the president of its manufacturing division, in line with the South China Morning Publish.
Huawei final month an embodied AI middle in Shenzhen. The middle, it mentioned, will give attention to integrating AI into bodily entities, together with robots. The Huawei International Embodied AI Trade Innovation Middle will construct what Huawei calls key foundational applied sciences, involving areas like embodied AI fashions and computing energy. The middle has additionally partnered with Shenzhen-based robotics firms like Leju Robotic and Han’s Robotic.
Huawei’s robotic pursuits, nonetheless, could be traced again to 2022, when it partnered with Dataa Robotics. Beneath the partnership, the businesses labored collectively to develop multimodal massive language fashions and new robotics purposes. Later, in March 2024, Leju Robotic launched robotic merchandise powered by Huawei’s LLM Pangu.
China’s robotics business
Robotic density within the manufacturing business in 2023, in line with the IFR. | Supply: IFR
It shouldn’t come as a shock that one in every of China’s largest know-how firms is investing extra in robotics. China has made rising its robotics business a precedence in recent times.
In accordance with the Worldwide Federation of Robotics (IFR), China is by far the biggest robotics market. The IFR mentioned the 276,288 industrial robots put in in China in 2023 characterize 51% of all world robotics installations. China additionally has a robotic density of 470 robotic’s per 10,000 staff, the IFR mentioned, the third-highest robotic density on the earth behind solely the Republic of Korea and Singapore.
In 2023, China created an motion plan referred to as the “Robotic + Utility Motion Plan.” This plan laid out 10 industries the nation desires to give attention to creating robotic methods for and overarching targets for the nation’s robotics business to hit by 2025. The nation additionally mentioned it deliberate to mass-produce humanoid robots by 2025.
Different outstanding robotics firms are taking be aware. This week, we reported that Common Robots A/S established manufacturing capabilities in Nantong, China. The corporate will produce two new cobots for that market: the UR7e and UR12e. UR mentioned the specification of those fashions has been “particularly chosen to satisfy the wants of China’s automotive, digital, and steel & equipment industries alongside others.”