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Alternative Market Briefing

Industrial robot cost decline as technology is set to hit many other tipping points

Friday, September 01, 2017

Matthias Knab, Opalesque:

ARK Invest writes on Harvest Exchange:

According to ARK's research, industrial robot1 costs will drop by roughly 65%, to levels much lower than most analysts now anticipate, by 2025. Combined with advances in machine learning and computer vision, this drop in costs should cause an inflection point in the demand for robots as they infiltrate new industries with more provocative use cases.

[view all charts on Harvest]

ARK anticipates that industrial robots will cost less than $11,000 per unit, much less than the Boston Consulting Group's (BCG's) expectation of $24,000, by 2025, as shown above. Fundamental to our analysis is Wright's Law: that is, for every cumulative doubling in number of units produced, costs will decline by a consistent percentage.3 In the robotics space, that cost decline - known as the learning rate - has been roughly 50%. Based on historical production and pricing data, ARK's application of Wright's Law suggests that BCG's expectations are far too conservative.

While BCG4 anticipates that the historical price trajectory of robots will diminish and stall in response to underlying material costs, it fails to anticipate and incorporate innovations evolving in manufacturing. 3D printing, for example, should reduce the use and weight of materials dramatically, up to 75%, without diminishing performance.I......................

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