Walk into a home in Berlin, Seoul or San Francisco and the disc-shaped robot gliding across the floor is probably Chinese. Two companies — Ecovacs (科沃斯) and Roborock (石头科技) — turned a once-quirky gadget, the robot vacuum (扫地机器人), into a global category, and most buyers never check the label.
This is the quieter side of China's robotics story: not humanoids in labs, but household service robots (服务机器人) already earning real money abroad.
From a Suzhou workshop to global shelves
Ecovacs was founded in Suzhou in 1998 by Qian Dongqi (钱东奇), a former philosophy teacher who started with vacuum cleaners for Western brands. In 2006 the company launched DEEBOT (地宝), one of China's first home robots. Roborock, founded in 2014, took a different route — it grew up online and leaned hard into overseas retail.
Both now sell far beyond China. In Ecovacs' 2024 annual report, its two brands — Ecovacs and the floor-care line Tineco (添可) — booked overseas revenue of about RMB 6.8 billion (≈ US$945M), roughly 42% of brand revenue. Europe was the engine: Ecovacs-brand overseas sales rose 52% and Tineco's 64% year on year.
Roborock's tilt is even sharper. In 2024 its overseas revenue reached about RMB 6.39 billion (≈ US$887M), up 51%, and for the first time exceeded its domestic sales. The company is now preparing a Hong Kong listing to sit alongside its Shanghai one, explicitly to fund international expansion.
The numbers behind the quiet takeover
The category itself is big and growing. Per IDC, the global robot-vacuum market shipped about 20.6 million units in 2024, up 11%, worth roughly US$9.3 billion, up nearly 20%. And Chinese brands lead it.
Roborock was the No. 1 brand worldwide in 2024 by both shipment volume (about 16% share) and sales value (about 22%), overtaking the long-dominant iRobot, with shipments up more than 20%. It ranked first in the Nordics, Germany, France, South Korea and Turkey. By most global retail rankings, Chinese names — Ecovacs, Roborock, Dreame (追觅) and others — now fill the majority of the top tier, with iRobot the main non-Chinese name left.
Why Chinese brands won the kitchen-table robot
Three things lined up. First, a cost edge in the hard parts: laser radar, brushless motors and sensors are made domestically, which hands Chinese firms both volume and pricing power in higher-end models.
Second, a willingness to ship weird, useful features fast — self-emptying docks, hot-water mop washing, robotic arms that extend to clean corners. Western incumbents iterated slower.
Third, channel control. Roborock has been "de-agency-izing" overseas, taking direct control of Amazon storefronts and local e-commerce in major European countries, trading short-term margin for long-term grip on the customer.
The next frontier: lawns, windows, and a price war
The battle is spreading off the floor. Ecovacs' overseas sales of window-cleaning robots jumped 215% and lawn-mowing robots 187% in 2024. Its GOAT mower uses "vision robotics" and it has partnered with Germany's BSH on built-in cleaning robots. Even drone-maker DJI (大疆) has registered a robot-vacuum brand, ROMO, signaling the category is about to get crowded.
That crowding means margins will thin. Roborock's net margin fell from about 24% in 2023 to roughly 17% in 2024 as it spent to win share — the cost of going global is real.
The incumbent that lost the crown
The clearest sign of the shift is iRobot. The American pioneer that once defined the category has slipped from global leader to a brand now fighting for relevance, displaced at the top by Roborock in 2024 shipment and value rankings alike. Its struggle shows the moat was never the logo on the box — it was the supply chain and the speed of feature iteration, both of which now sit with Chinese makers who ship weird, useful upgrades every few months.
Trend reading
According to Li An, Chief Scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), China's authoritative AI observatory, the home-robot export wave matters because it proves Chinese robotics can win on consumer trust and after-sales, not just factory price — the hardest test for any hardware going abroad.
Honest limitations
Figures here come from company annual reports and IDC data relayed by Chinese financial media; we did not audit the underlying shipments. Market-share percentages vary slightly by source (one cites 16.7% volume / 23.4% value for Roborock). Overseas "revenue" can include sales to distributors, not end users, so true consumer penetration may be lower. We have not compared service quality or return rates across regions, which strongly affect long-term brand health.
What readers can do now
- If you shop for a robot vacuum, compare the China-origin premium models (Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame) against iRobot on features-per-dollar — the gap has widened.
- If you track tech exports, treat Ecovacs' and Roborock's overseas-revenue share as a clean pulse on Chinese consumer-hardware going global.
- If you build hardware, study their "de-agency" channel playbook: owning the overseas storefront beats pure OEM margin in the long run.