China’s fast-growing robotics sector is attracting major attention, but a closer look suggests the industry is still struggling to turn hype into sustained revenue, with many companies relying heavily on pilot projects and demonstrations rather than scalable commercial deployment. In Shanghai, firms such as Agibot are testing wheeled and humanoid robots in controlled environments like mock supermarkets and kitchens, where human operators remotely guide machines through repetitive tasks to generate training data for “embodied intelligence” systems. While these setups are designed to improve machine learning performance and accelerate development, analysts say real-world adoption remains limited, and profitability is still uncertain. The sector continues to benefit from strong investment and policy support, but the gap between technical progress and viable business models highlights a key challenge: moving robots from experimental “data factories” into cost-effective tools that can compete with human labour at scale.
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