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Cobot Market

Set for Annual Growth Rates of 20 - 30%

The pandemic hasn’t exactly gone away. So there’s uncertainty. 2022 has seen new waves across the globe. People don’t know if it will come back again. So cobots are being used as a form of futureproofing. Maya Xiao discusses how the collaborative robot market is performing.

Maya Xiao

Senior Analyst, Interact Analysis, UK Q. What impact has the pandemic had on demand for cobots?

It’s had a positive impact...if we can talk about ‘positives’ coming from the virus. It’s true 2020 was the first ever year of negative growth for the cobot market, but 2021 saw a sharp recovery. And our forecasts for the mediumterm are better than we had previously predicted. We now calculate the average ROI on a cobot is just 2 - 3 years, down from 5 years.

There are several reasons for this recovery. The first is that the pandemic has encouraged more companies to try automation as a solution to virus-related disruption. And now, as we come out of COVID, we have on-going labour shortages. Even emerging economies such as China and Mexico are feeling the pinch of rising labour costs.

The growing number of real-world examples has played its part too. When one company invests in cobots, and the solution is seen to work, competitors follow suit. Many pioneering companies have already deployed cobots, and now there’s a ripple effect.

And finally, the pandemic hasn’t exactly gone away. So there’s uncertainty. 2022 has seen new waves across the globe. People don’t know if it will come back again. So cobots are being used as a form of future-proofing. In this respect, COVID is not just a short-term driver. It’s a medium and even long-term one as well.

Q. So what’s the long-term outlook for the cobot market?

Up to 2025 and 2026, the outlook for cobots remains strong. Our final numbers are about to be released and it’s clearly looking like a larger market in the medium-term than we had previously forecast. One interesting thing to be aware of, and what sets them apart from industrial robots, is that cobots have broken out of manufacturing and into the wider service sector. For this reason, the cobot market will start to be more closely related to the performance of the wider macro economy.

Q. What’s the single most interesting thing you’ve learned about cobots in your research?

It’s hard to pick one thing, but one interesting element is to do with the

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