Huawei has made a number of strikes just lately that point out robotics changing 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 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 keeping with Huawei Central. Huawei mentioned Jimu’s enterprise scope consists of digital part 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 keeping with the South China Morning Publish.
Huawei final month an embodied AI heart in Shenzhen. The middle, it mentioned, will concentrate on integrating AI into bodily entities, together with robots. The Huawei World Embodied AI Trade 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 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. Underneath the partnership, the businesses labored collectively to develop multimodal giant language fashions and new robotics purposes. Later, in March 2024, Leju Robotic launched robotic merchandise powered by Huawei’s LLM Pangu.
China’s robotics trade
Robotic density within the manufacturing trade in 2023, in keeping with the IFR. | Supply: IFR
It shouldn’t come as a shock that certainly one of China’s largest know-how firms is investing extra in robotics. China has made rising its robotics trade a precedence in recent times.
In line 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 international 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 this planet behind solely the Republic of Korea and Singapore.
In 2023, China created an motion plan known as the “Robotic + Software Motion Plan.” This plan laid out 10 industries the nation needs to concentrate on creating robotic techniques for and overarching objectives for the nation’s robotics trade to hit by 2025. The nation additionally mentioned it deliberate to mass-produce humanoid robots by 2025.
Different distinguished robotics firms are taking word. 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 fulfill the wants of China’s automotive, digital, and steel & equipment industries alongside others.”
