Huawei invests $413M into robotics subsidiary

Huawei Technologies, a Shenzhen-based telecommunications provider, last week invested 3 billion yuan (about $413 million) into its subsidiary Dongguan Jimu Machinery. The South China Morning Post first reported this story. Huawei has not publicly disclosed the investment. 

Huawei established Jimu in June 2023, when it registered the company with 870 million yuan in financing (about $121 million), according to Huawei Central. Huawei said Jimu’s business scope includes electronic component manufacturing, engineering and technical research, the import and export of goods including technology, experimental development, and more.

Jimu is led by Li Jianguo, an executive director at Huawei, and the president of its manufacturing department, according to the South China Morning Post.

Huawei last month an embodied AI center in Shenzhen. The center, it said, will focus on integrating AI into physical entities, including robots. The Huawei Global Embodied AI Industry Innovation Center will build what Huawei calls key foundational technologies, involving areas like embodied AI models and computing power. The center has also partnered with Shenzhen-based robotics companies like Leju Robot and Han’s Robot. 

Huawei’s robotic interests, however, can be traced back to 2022, when it partnered with Dataa Robotics. Under the partnership, the companies worked together to develop multimodal large language models and new robotics applications. Later, in March 2024, Leju Robot released robot products powered by Huawei’s LLM Pangu. 

China’s robotics industry

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of China’s largest technology companies is investing more in robotics. China has made growing its robotics industry a priority in recent years. 

According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), China is by far the largest robotics market. The IFR said the 276,288 industrial robots installed in China in 2023 represent 51% of all global robotics installations. China also has a robot density of 470 robot’s per 10,000 employees, the IFR said, the third-highest robot density in the world behind only the Republic of Korea and Singapore.

In 2023, China created an action plan called the “Robot + Application Action Plan.” This plan laid out 10 industries the country wants to focus on developing robotic systems for and overarching goals for the country’s robotics industry to hit by 2025. The country also said it planned to mass-produce humanoid robots by 2025. 

Other prominent robotics companies are taking note. This week, we reported that Universal Robots A/S established manufacturing capabilities in Nantong, China. The company will produce two new cobots for that market: the UR7e and UR12e. UR said the specification of these models has been “specifically chosen to meet the needs of China’s automotive, electronic, and metal & machinery industries alongside others.”