A warehouse worker in Tokyo spends her shift walking nine kilometers a day, pulling carts between steel shelves to pick apparel orders. Two thousand kilometers away in Shenzhen, engineers at Hai Robotics (海柔创新) have built a robot that climbs the racks themselves, fetches a tote, and delivers it to a workstation in under two minutes. The Tokyo worker's employer, fashion retailer BEAMS, installed 57 of these machines in its Tokyo fulfillment center and cut picking labor by 70 percent, according to a company-published case study.
That mismatch — human legs versus climbing robots — is now a global procurement question, not a local one.
Key takeaways
- Hai Robotics, the Shenzhen pioneer of the ACR (automated case-handling mobile robot) category, says more than 10,000 HaiPick Climb robots are contracted for projects in 12 countries.
- The count is contracted units, not audited deployments — but eight repeat customers and integrator deals in Europe and North America are concrete adoption signals.
- Climbing robots split the difference between cheap-but-flat AMRs and rigid AS/RS: at BEAMS Tokyo, picking labor fell 70 percent and storage capacity rose 1.8 times (company case study).
The milestone, and what it actually means
Hai Robotics recently announced that more than 10,000 HaiPick Climb robots have been contracted for customer projects worldwide. Independent warehouse-industry outlets picked up the news, and one thing they flagged matters: these are contracted units, not verified deployments. The company has not published a country-by-country or project-by-project breakdown, and no third party has audited the total.
Even with that caveat, the scale is notable. Since its global introduction in 2025, HaiPick Climb has been selected for projects in 12 countries across Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Australia. Named customers include sportswear giant ANTA, Panasonic, logistics provider Arvato, trading house ITOCHU, precision-instrument maker METTLER TOLEDO and supplement retailer True Protein. Eight customers have expanded existing systems or ordered again, according to founder and CEO Richie Chen.
- 10,000+ HaiPick Climb robots contracted worldwide (company figure)
- Projects in 12 countries across five continents
- Named users: ANTA, Panasonic, Arvato, ITOCHU, METTLER TOLEDO, True Protein
- Repeat orders from eight customers
Why "climbing" changed the warehouse economics
Traditional warehouse automation comes in two flavors, and both have pain. Conventional AS/RS (automated storage and retrieval systems) — the shuttle-and-crane systems used by big retailers for decades — is fast but expensive and rigid: it needs dedicated steel structures, months of construction, and a fixed floor plan. Floor-level mobile robots are cheap and flexible, but they cannot use vertical space.
Hai Robotics helped pioneer a third category it calls ACR, or automated case-handling mobile robot (自动化料箱搬运机器人). The robots drive on the ground, then climb the racks themselves, shuttling totes and cartons from shelf levels up to several meters high. Because the robots provide the vertical motion, the racks stay simple and cheap. A facility can start with a few dozen robots and scale up as volumes grow — which is exactly how BEAMS and sportswear brands have adopted it.
The company claims the approach lifts throughput about three times versus manual picking, cuts labor costs by roughly two-thirds, and reaches 99 percent-plus picking accuracy. These are vendor figures, not independent measurements, but the direction is consistent with what customers describe. In the BEAMS case study, six pickers now handle the workload that previously required about twenty, and storage capacity rose 1.8 times after the racks were rebuilt around the robots.
A Shenzhen company with Dutch, Japanese and American addresses
Hai Robotics was founded in 2016 in Shenzhen and claims the world's first ACR system, developed the year before. It has since grown past 1,300 employees and more than 600 global patents, and it has quietly assembled an international footprint: subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
The most recent moves look less like exporting boxes and more like embedding into local supply chains. The company opened an EMEA Innovation Center in Hoofddorp, near Amsterdam, where European customers can test goods-to-person systems under real operating conditions before signing. In the US, it works through integrator Hy-Tek Intralogistics, including a warehouse automation project for auto-parts retailer NAPA. In Europe, it is expanding a five-year partnership with Swiss integrator Ferag Solutions across the EMEA region. In Japan, ANTA's third Hai-powered warehouse in Jinjiang was designed to process up to 200,000 pieces a day.
The pattern matters for global readers: the robots that will sort your sneakers, your allergy medication and your holiday orders are increasingly designed in China, integrated by Western partners, and operating inside Western brands' own facilities.
Why now — and why it's not just one company
E-commerce keeps compressing delivery windows while warehouse hiring gets harder almost everywhere — from Ohio to Osaka. Goods-to-person automation is the industry's standard answer, and Chinese vendors are competing on a familiar axis: lower cost, faster deployment, more modular scaling. Hai is not alone. Quicktron, Hikrobot and Geek+ are all selling Chinese-built warehouse robots internationally, and Hai says its ACR solutions held the largest share of that segment by 2025 revenue and shipments.
Honest limitations
- The 10,000-robot figure is a contracted-unit count published by the company, not an independently audited deployment count. Warehouse trade press has pointed out that Hai has not disclosed how the units split across countries or projects, and none of the named HaiPick Climb customers has been confirmed as a US deployment.
- Performance claims — 3x throughput, 67% lower labor costs, 99%+ accuracy — are vendor marketing figures, not third-party measurements.
- The market-share and overseas-revenue claims come from company disclosures and Chinese business references, not audited filings. Hai is private, so its financials cannot be independently verified.
- Automation reduces one kind of warehouse job while creating others (robot maintenance, system operations); the net employment effect in any given region is genuinely uncertain.
What readers can do now
- If you run a warehouse or fulfillment operation, benchmark climbing-robot systems against both conventional AS/RS and floor AMRs on total cost over five years — including rack rebuilds and integration — rather than on robot price alone.
- Ask any vendor to separate contracted units from live deployments, and to connect you with a reference customer running a similar order profile for at least a year.
- If you follow automation stocks or logistics trends, watch the integrator channel (Hy-Tek, Ferag) as a signal: Chinese hardware winning Western integrators is a stronger adoption signal than press releases.