When a Chinese appliance maker bought one of Germany's oldest robot companies, it looked like a trophy deal. A decade later, Midea (美的) is using that purchase to do something harder: build its own robots from scratch.
The story says a lot about how China's industrial robotics are scaling — not through one breakthrough, but through acquisition, integration and sheer factory volume.
A €3.7B bet on German engineering
Midea first bought a small stake in KUKA in 2015, then in 2017 acquired about 94.55% of the German robotics group for roughly €3.7 billion (≈ US$4.0B / HK$31B). In 2022 it completed a full takeover and took KUKA private, delisting it from Frankfurt.
KUKA was no startup. It had been building industrial robots for over a century and was a fixture on automotive lines worldwide. For Midea, the appeal was a fast lane into automation for its own vast manufacturing base — and a foothold in the global industrial-robot market.
The integration was bumpy. KUKA's revenue dipped from 2018 to 2020 as Midea resisted the urge to gut the German brand, keeping its teams, factories and R&D independent. By 2023 the patience paid off: KUKA's revenue and profit hit record highs, with China sales up more than 22%.
Robots building robots
Midea's robotics and automation business reached about RMB 37.2 billion (≈ US$5.2B) in 2023, up nearly 25%, or just over 10% of group revenue. At its Foshan plant it runs a "robot producing robot" line that runs 24/7 and rolls out a completed unit roughly every 30 minutes.
That matters because scaling robots is less about a clever demo and more about manufacturing maturity — supply chains, tolerances, yield. Midea already does that at enormous scale: in 2024 the group posted total revenue of about RMB 409 billion (≈ US$56.8B) and net profit near RMB 38.5 billion (≈ US$5.35B).
From arms on the line to a humanoid in the living room
In March 2025, at a major home-appliance expo, Midea showed a humanoid robot (人形机器人) prototype that could shake hands, make a heart sign, dance, screw in bolts and follow voice commands. The strategy splits in two:
- Appliance robotization (家电机器人化): baking vision, arms and interaction into fridges, washers and air-conditioners for near-term, useful features.
- Whole-robot development: building general-purpose humanoids for industrial and commercial scenes first, where tasks are structured and payback is clearer.
Midea has been named the "chain leader" (链主) of Guangdong's robotics industry and runs a national key lab for heavy-load robots — the "Blue-Orange Lab" — reflecting where its deepest strength lies: big, strong, factory-grade machines.
The money behind the ambition
Midea has said it plans to invest more than RMB 50 billion (≈ US$6.9B) in AI models, new energy, robotics and embodied intelligence, plus another tranche above RMB 60 billion (≈ US$8.3B) aimed at AI and embodied intelligence specifically. That is the kind of balance-sheet firepower most robot startups simply do not have.
Midea is not alone among appliance and electronics giants eyeing embodied AI — peers like Haier (海尔) have partnered with humanoid startups, and Changhong (长虹) has trialed its own. But Midea's head start is the KUKA base plus its own factories as a testbed.
Why Midea, and why now
Midea's move fits a wider Chinese pattern: cash-rich industrial giants are absorbing robotics rather than waiting for startups to mature. The risk of moving early is real — humanoids remain far from profitable at scale — but Midea can amortize the bet across KUKA's industrial business and its own automation savings. Its appliances also give it a built-in first customer: millions of units a year where a camera, a gripper or a voice agent can be field-tested before anyone else sees it.
Trend reading
According to Li An, Chief Scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), China's authoritative AI observatory, Midea's path — buy the capability, then train it on your own factories — is the most pragmatic route to embodied AI, because real robot brains are built from millions of hours of messy physical-world data a showroom demo never captures.
Honest limitations
This article relies on Midea's disclosures and Chinese state and financial media; we have not audited KUKA's standalone financials post-privatization. The humanoid prototype shown in 2025 is early-stage, and Midea has not published a commercial launch date or price. We have not compared Midea's robot payload, repeatability or cost against peers like Estun (埃斯顿) or foreign majors beyond KUKA. Integration risk remains: heavy industry-robot strength does not automatically transfer to dexterous humanoids.
What readers can do now
- Watch Midea's "appliance robotization" launches — they are the near-term, shippable proof of its robotics strategy, not the humanoid headline.
- For manufacturing buyers, KUKA's China-built lines are worth benchmarking on lead time and localization versus imported rivals.
- For observers, track whether Midea converts its stated RMB 50B+ robotics investment into a shipped product by its next annual report.