Industrial chains of four major robots brands are transferred to Chinese mainland

Based on strenuous cultivation of marketing in China, ABB, KUKA, YASKAWA and FANUC's strategy of sinking channels and accelerating localization bring new opportunities for capacity transfered to China and supply chain reset. As the core component of robots, reducer is with largest cost and highest technical content. It lacks not the breakthrough of the core technology, but the cost reduction and stability brought by the equipment amortization and process improvement. The problem, after years of investment and process accumulation, has reached the point of mass production. At the same time, the supply of foreign reducer giants is insufficient, and the acceptance of domestic reducers has been greatly improved.

In recent years, the production capacity and output of the four major robot brands in China have been continuously improved (except Fanuc), which has accelerated significantly in 2018. It is expected that the production capacity in China will continue to expand. At the same time, the development of the domestic robot industry is also accelerating expansion. On the one hand, it is continuously expanding production capacity, on the other hand, the capacity utilization rate is constantly climbing.

RV reducer market

Nabtesco: slow expansion, insufficient capacity
The global market share of Nabtesco, the world's largest reducer supplier, is over 60%, and the global market share of pure RV reducers may be over 80%. At present, there are two major production plants in Japan's Tsu Factory and China's Changzhou Plant. In 2018, the output of the reducer is about 840,000 units. In the next 5 years, the capacity of Nabo reducer will not expand significantly. Firstly, the production of reducer is a very complex process, simply investing on equipments can not increase production capacity. Besides, after the experience of bubble era, Japanese companies are very cautious about fixed assets investment, expanding will be not easy.

As to the other two RV giants, Sumitomo heavy-duty reducer business is increasingly marginalized, and Spine Spinea's reducer business may be strategically abandoned. Insufficient supply of foreign RV reducers will bring Chinese manufacturers a huge opportunity.

Great Opportunity for Chinese reducer and reducer bearing suppliers

From the end of 2016, Nabtesco's order list continues to be full, surpassing its existing production capacity. And the delivery period is continuously extended, plus the four major robots company are given priority, so the delivery time of domestic customer orders is longer. The company's capacity expansion is slow. Although the demand continues to be strong, we expect this situation to continue in the next few years. The domestic RV reducer will fill the market vacancy, and the acceptance is expected to be greatly improved.

2018 is the first year of mass production of domestic RV reducer, and it is expected to burst in 2019. The Chinese domestic RV reducer can break through the core problem of “process + equipment”, and the RV reducer development does not require theoretical breakthroughs(Nabotesk, Hamonic's reducer patents have been published). They just need to follow the footsteps of the giants, accumulate at the process level and purchase advanced machine tool processing equipment, which takes much shorter time than the theoretical research.

Under this situation, the demand for main supporting angular contact ball bearing and crank shaft bearing(tapered roller bearing) will increase too. BRS has prepared well for the growing demand, products technique has been improved and lead time is under control.