Chinese Bundled Cobots Undercut UR

This price gap means the fight has shifted from selling a bare robot arm to selling a ready to run workstation. Universal Robots built the biggest cobot installed base, with more than 100,000 units sold and a broad partner ecosystem, but Chinese vendors are winning deals by packaging the arm, gripper, safety hardware, and prebuilt cell together for less. That changes the buying decision from software familiarity to total installed cost and time to deployment.

• Chinese robot makers now hold 57% of their home market, up sharply over the last decade. That scale lets them spread engineering and supply chain costs across a much larger domestic volume base, which helps explain how bundled cells can come in 30% to 40% below Western systems on delivered price.
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• UR still has the largest field footprint and a strong ecosystem moat. Its official materials cite more than 100,000 cobots sold, and its ecosystem is built around third party tooling and integrators. A lower priced bundled cell attacks that model by collapsing separate line items into one vendor sale.
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• Agile Robots is positioned around deeper built in force control. Its products emphasize joint torque sensing and force controlled manipulation, while UR is under financial pressure inside Teradyne, where 2025 robotics revenue was $308M and the segment recorded a roughly $100M operating loss, followed by job cuts and impairment review signals.
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The next phase of cobots looks more like appliance buying than component buying. Vendors that can ship a complete cell fast, at low cost, with force control already built into the robot, should keep taking share. That favors Chinese suppliers and strengthens Agile Robots if it can turn sensing performance into repeatable, packaged factory deployments.