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Japanese Industrial automation giant Mitsubishi Electric announced on the 24th that it will increase the price of its entire line of products from February 1, 2023, with an increase of 10-20%. Among them, the price of industrial Robots will increase by 15%, and the price of industrial computers will increase by 20%.

It is worth noting that the price of “servo motors”, which are key components of robots, has risen for the first time since 2012, with an increase of 15%.

Mitsubishi Electric Product Price Increase List

Prior to June, Mitsubishi Electric had raised the prices of power distribution control equipment, motors and inverters in the field of factory automation by 10-30%.

As for the reasons for the price increase, Mitsubishi Electric said that the cost of main materials for these products has continued to remain high, and since 2020, the cost of main materials such as copper, aluminum, resin and rare earths used for magnets has doubled or tripled , coupled with the increase in logistics costs, although the company is committed to implementing cost reduction measures such as production optimization, and trying its best to ensure a stable supply of raw materials and products, “it is really difficult to maintain the current price.”

Japan plays a pivotal role in the industrial robot market. Among the traditional “four families” of industrial robots, Japanese companies occupy two seats, namely Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric, and they are also facing the situation of high upstream costs, which are passed on through price increases. This pressure has become the common choice of the giants.

Taking Yaskawa Electric as an example, the company said that the increase in costs has reduced the company’s profit by 3.5 billion yen in the March-August period, and has slightly lowered its profit forecast for the full year of fiscal 2022 (ending February 2023). The company’s executives admitted that “the transfer of costs is accelerating, but there is a time lag in the inclusion of new orders (that have completed price increases).”

In order to reduce costs, Yaskawa Electric also invested 50 billion-60 billion yen to build its own parts production line. Yaskawa Electric’s president Hiroshi Ogasawara said, “We will slightly change the previous idea of ​​sourcing parts from the world and increase the ratio of independent production (parts).”

In fact, since the beginning of this year, it is not uncommon for robot products to increase in price due to high costs. According to incomplete statistics from the “Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily”, there are already ABB, Inovance, Eft, Nabot, Laifu Harmonic, Manufacturers such as Astrobot, Erbit, and Peitian have publicly announced price increases.

Strong downstream demand, industry boom is expected to improve

At the same time, the accelerated process of industrial automation under the epidemic has boosted the process of “machine substitution” under the declining labor force and rising labor costs, and the industrial Robot Industry is booming.

At present, my country ranks first in the world’s largest Industrial Robot market. According to reports, since the beginning of this year, the new energy vehicle industry has accelerated the expansion of production, and the upstream and downstream of the industry have become more dependent on automated production and manufacturing. Industrial robot companies such as Meher and Eft have been intensively harvesting major orders for automotive automation production lines in the near future, and companies such as Estun and Inovance Technology have seen rapid growth in their shipments in the first half of this year.

In the face of strong downstream demand, giants such as Fanuc have set an annual plan early: before the end of 2022, the production capacity of the latest models of collaborative robots (complete auxiliary work beside a person) will be increased to more than three times that by the end of 2021.

Industry insiders said that with the continuous improvement of technical capabilities and product quality, the scale of the industrial robot market is expected to continue to increase. At present, the two major industries of automobile and 3C electronics have strong demand for industrial robots. In the future, the application market of industrial robots such as chemical industry and petroleum will gradually open up.

From the perspective of investment, the importance of core components in the robot industry chain is very prominent. On the one hand, high-performance components are the basis for realizing robot perception and motion; on the other hand, the cost of core components is relatively high. Taking traditional industrial robots as an example, core components account for more than 70% of the cost of the entire industrial robot.

Kaiyuan Securities said that the localization of domestic industrial robots is highly deterministic, and the most noteworthy are the upstream components of domestic industrial robots and the midstream body of industrial robots. Dongguan Securities also suggested that attention should be paid to the upstream segments of industrial robots.

In China, listed companies in the reducer segment include Hanyu Group, Zhongdadi, Green Harmonic, Shuanghuan Transmission, Qinchuan Machine Tool, Han’s Laser, etc.; in the servo motor segment, there are Mingzhi Electric, Buke Co., Ltd., Hechuan Technology, Estun, Jiangsu Lely, etc.; Hanyu Group, etc. can provide sensors.