China can excel in consumer robotics, says Credit Suisse Asset Management specialist
- Size of demand difficult to estimate as market is emerging, says senior portfolio manager Angus Muirhead
- China has yet to crack high-end market where consistent and accurate movements are required
China can become a formidable player in the nascent consumer robotics market, where precision of movements is not as important as with industrial robotics.
“The big opportunities are in the lower price segment, which I think is going to be a much bigger market than what we have today. And it is a good place [for Chinese manufacturers] to learn before making the move up [to the higher-end market],” Angus Muirhead, senior portfolio manager at Credit Suisse Asset Management, said in an interview on the sidelines of the bank’s Asian investment conference in Hong Kong this week.
While China is already one of the world’s largest makers of industrial automation machinery, it has yet to crack the high-end market where consistent and accurate movements are required, in some cases, such as the semiconductor industry, down to one-tenth of a millimetre.
“China is catching up, but the quality is not there yet,” said Muirhead, adding that the biggest technological challenge lay in software that controls robots’ movements.
Muirhead manages the CS (Lux) Global Robotics equity fund, which recorded returns of 45.7 per cent in 2017, negative 6.8 per cent last year and 16 per cent from the start of this year to March 17, according to trustnet.com.
China no match for US unicorns in AI, big data and robotics as it continues to play catch-up in R&D, says Credit Suisse
Making coffee, taking restaurant orders and answering customer queries in shopping malls, banks, hotels and hospitals are examples of largely untapped opportunities for customer service provision applications, previously prohibitive because of high costs of both the machines and their repair and maintenance.
