The Robots Running America’s Reshoring Dream Are Not American

The Equation Nobody Is Completing

Every major reshoring announcement of the past three years has arrived with the same assumed logic. Manufacturing returns to American soil. Automation closes the labour cost gap that offshoring once exploited. Factories run on robots. The supply chain risk that a decade of geopolitical turbulence exposed gets addressed by bringing production home.

The equation is correct in every variable except the one that makes it work.

The United States used to dominate the robotics industry in the 1960s, starting with the world’s first industrial robot installed at a General Motors plant in 1961. Union resistance, along with a lack of investment or government support, left an opening for Japan, which by the late 1960s saw robotics as a growth strategy. European companies soon followed.

The country that invented the industrial robot no longer makes one at meaningful scale. The semiconductor fabrication plants, the EV battery gigafactories, the pharmaceutical facilities, and the advanced electronics plants that anchor the reshoring narrative — when they break ground on American soil today, the robotic arms inside come from Japan, from a German company now owned by China, or from a Swiss-Swedish industrial giant whose robotics division was just sold to Japan. The majority of industrial robots used in the United States are still produced abroad, largely in Japan, Germany, China, and South Korea. That reliance on foreign hardware introduces risk and limits the self-sufficiency of domestic production.

No federal bill addresses this. No tariff closes it. This is a structural gap in the American industrial base that took forty years to create and will not be resolved within any single presidential term — including the one that has made reshoring the centrepiece of its economic identity.

The Four Companies That Run the World’s Factory Floors

The global industrial robotics market is one of the most concentrated sectors in advanced manufacturing. The top four vendors — FANUC, ABB, Yaskawa, and KUKA — control approximately 75% of global shipments. Four companies. Three quarters of every industrial robot installed in every factory on earth. And the ownership map of those four companies tells the story of American industrial sovereignty more precisely than any policy document.

FANUC. Japanese. Founded in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1956, spun out of Fujitsu’s numerical control research programme. The world’s largest manufacturer of industrial robots by unit volume, with revenues of approximately $7 billion annually. Its yellow robots are in every major automotive plant, semiconductor facility, and electronics assembly line on the planet. It does not have an American parent. It has never had an American parent. It produced its one millionth industrial robot in September 2023.

Yaskawa Electric. Japanese. Founded in Kitakyushu in 1915. Its MOTOMAN robots are among the most widely deployed industrial automation systems in North American manufacturing. Yaskawa’s robotics segment contributes 40.3% of total revenue, with geographic distribution across Japan at 29.2%, the Americas at 21.0%, and China at 24.4%. American factories depend on Yaskawa. Yaskawa answers to Tokyo.

KUKA. German by founding, Chinese by ownership. China’s household appliance manufacturer Midea acquired 76.4% of KUKA’s shares in 2016, completing what had been one of the most politically contentious industrial acquisitions in European history. The German government attempted to find a European counter-bidder. It failed. KUKA’s orange robots — the ones that dominate automotive manufacturing across Europe and increasingly in North American plants — are now a Chinese-controlled asset. The $4.5 billion acquisition that completed in 2016 was, in retrospect, the opening move in a systematic Chinese strategy to acquire control of industrial automation infrastructure in Western markets.

ABB Robotics. The last major industrial robotics company with any claim to Western alignment — Swiss-Swedish, part of the ABB Group that employed 105,000 people across 100 countries — announced in October 2025 that it was selling its robotics division to Japan’s SoftBank Group for $5.375 billion. ABB Robotics has a workforce of around 7,000 and revenues in 2024 of $2.3 billion. SoftBank has earmarked AI robotics as one of four essential sectors in which it is actively investing and expanding, alongside AI chips, AI data centres and energy. The acquisition is pending regulatory approval and expected to close in mid-to-late 2026.

The ownership map is now complete. Japan controls two of the four dominant industrial robotics companies outright and is acquiring a third. China controls the fourth through Midea. The United States controls none.

What the Numbers Actually Say

The scale of what has happened in global industrial robotics is best understood not through company ownership but through deployment data — because deployment data reveals the strategic intent behind the ownership.

The International Federation of Robotics World Robotics 2025 report showed 542,000 robots installed globally in 2024 — more than double the number ten years ago. Annual installations topped 500,000 units for the fourth straight year. Asia accounted for 74% of new deployments in 2024, compared with 16% in Europe and 9% in the Americas.

Nine percent of the Americas. In a year when American reshoring announcements were generating more political capital than at any point in the past three decades, the continent that hosts the world’s largest economy by GDP accounted for 9% of global industrial robot installations. China alone accounted for 54%.

China is by far the world’s largest market in 2024, representing 54% of global deployments. The latest figures show that 295,000 industrial robots were installed — the highest annual total on record. For the first time, Chinese manufacturers sold more than foreign suppliers in their home country. Their domestic market share climbed to 57% last year, up from about 28% over the past decade. China’s operational robot stock exceeded the 2 million mark in 2024, the largest of any country.

The United States, by contrast, installed approximately 34,000 industrial robots in 2024 — roughly 6% of China’s total. The country building the most ambitious manufacturing revival in a generation is installing robots at one eighteenth the rate of the country it is trying to decouple from. A comparison of the US and China reveals the enormous automation potential of the world’s largest economy by GDP. Most US robot hardware is imported from Japan and Europe. The situation is different in China, where 57% of the market is served by domestic manufacturers.

China both manufactures and deploys at scale. The United States imports and deploys at a fraction of the scale. That asymmetry is not a market outcome. It is a policy outcome — and understanding how it was produced is the prerequisite for understanding whether it can be reversed.

How America Lost the Industry It Invented

The United States had the industrial robot first. Unimate — developed by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger, installed at a General Motors plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey in 1961 — was the world’s first programmable industrial robot. It welded and extracted die castings on the GM production line. It worked reliably and safely. It was a genuine American technological achievement.

Union resistance, along with a lack of investment or government support, left an opening for Japan, which by the late 1960s saw robotics as a growth strategy. European companies soon followed.

Three forces compounded over the following four decades to produce the structural gap that the reshoring narrative is now colliding with.