China's Trickle-Down Supply Chain: From Intelligent Electric Vehicles to Robots

In the past decade, China has spent over $100 billion to boost the growth of the intelligent electric vehicle industry. As a result, China now owns the most sophisticated IEV supply chain and is the largest IEV market in the world. The IEV supply chain, including its talent pool, technologies, and manufacturing capabilities, will trickle down to empower various segments of the robotics and automation sector, thus accelerating China's economic transformation into the automation age. As robots become more ubiquitous in our daily lives, robots can be a source of productivity - and thus, robots can rescue China from the middle-income trap. The following figure compares the robotic technology supply chain market share between China and the United States. China generates more STEM graduates than the U.S., and increasingly more technology talents are moving back to China from the U.S. and Europe. Without an advanced microprocessor supply chain, China still has to rely on U.S. supply to sustain the growth of its robotics and automation sector in the foreseeable future.