Asia accounted for 74% of all new industrial robot installations worldwide in 2024. Switzerland, with almost no mass manufacturing base, fights hard for a place there anyway.
That fight already pays off. ABB's robotics arm pulled 1.1 billion dollars in revenue from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa combined in 2023, 31% of its total. Bühler Group draws 26% of its turnover from Asia alone. Revenue like that does not appear overnight. It sits on infrastructure built over decades: ABB's 150 million dollar, 67,000 square metre plant in Shanghai, one of only three such bases worldwide, and Bühler's Wuxi hub for China and Southeast Asia, running eight plants.
That infrastructure is where strategies diverge. STÄUBLI built for precision: its first site outside Europe, opened in Hangzhou in 1997, is now a 25,000 square metre campus whose robots run a fuel cell line in Cixi to plus or minus 0.01 millimetres. Bühler built for patience instead. Thirty years after opening in Bengaluru, its India unit grows over 10% a year, and is investing more to expand.
Both routes matter because the field keeps shifting. Japan remains the world's largest robot exporter, shipping close to 80% of what it builds, China its biggest buyer. China is shifting under its own suppliers' feet: domestic brands outsold foreign ones there for the first time in 2024, taking 57% of the home market, up from 47% a year earlier. South Korea holds ground differently: still the world's fourth-largest robot market, with the highest robot density on Earth.
Scale, price, and domestic share are not the battles Swiss firms are built to fight. Tolerance is where they compete instead, the trait behind Stäubli's Cixi line and Bühler's steady India growth, and it continues to win specification-critical work even against cheaper bids.
That logic points somewhere specific. Taiwan produces over 90% of the world's most advanced chips and hosts over 500 semiconductor firms, a natural fit for tolerance-driven robotics. Singapore fits differently: is the second-highest robot density worldwide, and over 2,700 precision engineering firms already in biomedical manufacturing.
The firms that keep showing up locally, as Stäubli and Bühler already have, are best placed to keep winning on tolerance over price.
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