2025 was a truly remarkable and surreal year for the industrial automation sector. It felt as if we were living in two distinct eras simultaneously: on one hand, the exciting technological revolutions of AI and humanoid robots; on the other, the fiercely competitive struggle for survival. Let’s review the year through 10 of the most discussed keywords.
2025 marks the conclusion of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan and a crucial juncture for the deepening implementation of the “Made in China 2025” strategy. The Chinese economy is entering a critical phase of transitioning from recovery to high-quality development, and the industrial automation industry is undergoing a long period of bottoming out and recovery. Despite the overall positive outlook, significant internal differentiation exists. However, the micro-level experience is far more complex. Industry differentiation is intensifying, with many SMEs suffering from both shrinking orders and declining profits, while leading companies are seeing their profits bottom out and recover.
**AI: From Concept to Value Creation**
If there’s a “top trend” in the industrial sector in 2025, it’s undoubtedly AI. That year, AI completed a crucial transformation from proof-of-concept to value creation, and its applications became more grounded. Beyond top-tier “lighthouse factories,” more medium-sized enterprises began deploying visual inspection at key quality control points and introducing AI predictive models in energy management. Although AI has demonstrated clear value, there’s still a long way to go before it truly integrates deeply into the “operating logic” of production systems.
**Humanoid Robots: Officially Debuting**
In 2025, humanoid robots, as “trainees” in the industrial sector, officially debuted. Continued investment from the capital market and leading manufacturers has accelerated their transition from laboratories to pilot workshops. The industrial ecosystem is maturing, but despite the hype, challenges remain significant; truly large-scale, market-driven procurement has yet to arrive. ****Involution: Reaching New Heights**
“Involution” became a buzzword over the past year, evolving from the beginning to the end, taking on new forms. Price wars were particularly fierce in sectors like photovoltaics and lithium batteries. The end of involution is industry differentiation, with the government, industry associations, and enterprises jointly launching a series of counter-involution measures.
**Going Global: Finding New Blue Oceans**
In 2025, under the pressure of weak domestic demand and involution, going global became a collective self-rescue for industrial enterprises. China’s “Belt and Road” overseas contracting projects demonstrated strong development momentum, reshaping the regional distribution of exports, and shifting the overseas expansion model from “product export” to “supply chain overseas expansion.”
**Supply Chain Resilience: From Efficiency to Security**
In 2025, the theme of supply chains shifted from efficiency and cost to “security” and “resilience.” Enterprises are moving from passive response to proactive restructuring, embedding resilience into their operational processes. The supply chain competition in 2026 will be about “who has the strongest resilience.”
**Price Hike Wave: Structural Price Increases**
In 2025, price increases became a core theme in the market, with domestic industries exhibiting characteristics of “structural price increases.” This trend spread deeply along the industrial chain, leading to a profound reshuffling of industries.
**Foreign Investment Localization: Deep Integration into the Innovation Ecosystem**
In 2025, foreign companies comprehensively upgraded their localization strategies, shifting from simple local production to deep integration into China’s innovation ecosystem. The influx of foreign brands squeezed the survival space of SMEs, increasing their pressure to transform.
**Hong Kong IPO Wave: Industry Development and Challenges Coexist**
In 2025, Hong Kong stocks became a crucial springboard for industrial companies to break through, with a surge of robotics-related companies listing in Hong Kong. This wave of IPOs is both a sign of the industry’s vigorous development and a foreshadowing of 2026 as a critical test of companies’ true commercialization capabilities and self-sustaining revenue generation.
**Software Industry Shakeup: Reshaping the Global Industrial Software Landscape**
In 2025, the global industrial software landscape was reshaped through frequent mergers and acquisitions. Industrial software giants gained control of core industrial know-how through acquisitions, reshaping the competitive boundaries of the manufacturing industry.
**Layoff Wave: A Wake-Up Call for the Workplace**
In 2025, “optimization” became the most euphemistic term for layoffs in the workplace. Behind this wave of layoffs lies companies’ thirst for high-end talent, and technologies such as AI are accelerating the restructuring of job security.
Looking back at the beginning of 2026, the past year has seen countless small acts of perseverance. All indications suggest that we are standing at the tail end of a long adjustment cycle. The industrial automation market is expected to enter a recovery cycle in the second quarter of 2026. With the unfolding of the 15th Five-Year Plan, the implementation of policies will unleash the enormous potential of new productive forces. Winter will eventually pass, and spring is on its way.
