Huawei has made a number of strikes just lately that point out robotics turning into an even 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 Submit 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 accordance with Huawei Central. Huawei stated Jimu’s enterprise scope contains digital part manufacturing, engineering and technical analysis, the import and export of products together with know-how, experimental improvement, and extra.
Jimu is led by Li Jianguo, an government director at Huawei, and the president of its manufacturing division, in accordance with the South China Morning Submit.
Huawei final month an embodied AI heart in Shenzhen. The middle, it stated, will concentrate on integrating AI into bodily entities, together with robots. The Huawei International Embodied AI Business Innovation Heart 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 corporations like Leju Robotic and Han’s Robotic.
Huawei’s robotic pursuits, nevertheless, will be traced again to 2022, when it partnered with Dataa Robotics. Below 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 accordance with the IFR. | Supply: IFR
It shouldn’t come as a shock that one among China’s largest know-how corporations is investing extra in robotics. China has made rising its robotics business a precedence lately.
In accordance with the Worldwide Federation of Robotics (IFR), China is by far the most important robotics market. The IFR stated the 276,288 industrial robots put in in China in 2023 symbolize 51% of all world robotics installations. China additionally has a robotic density of 470 robotic’s per 10,000 staff, the IFR stated, the third-highest robotic density on the planet behind solely the Republic of Korea and Singapore.
In 2023, China created an motion plan referred to as the “Robotic + Software Motion Plan.” This plan laid out 10 industries the nation desires to concentrate on growing robotic techniques for and overarching targets for the nation’s robotics business to hit by 2025. The nation additionally stated it deliberate to mass-produce humanoid robots by 2025.
Different outstanding robotics corporations are taking notice. 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 stated the specification of those fashions has been “particularly chosen to satisfy the wants of China’s automotive, digital, and metallic & equipment industries alongside others.”
