Sooner or later, the numbers were going to contract. Broadly speaking, the pandemic has been a gamechanger for automation broadly and robotics specifically. But not even those categories are immune from macro trends. Per new numbers from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) — whose job it is to track such things — North American robot orders declined a substantial 37% year-over-year for Q2 (April to July).
The figure, which includes a 20% drop in value, is the second consecutive decline. The two quarters combined represent a 29% drop from H1 of 2022. This most recent half saw a total of 16,856 robots. There are a lot of factors at play here, of course.
Before you go entirely doom and gloom, keep in mind that 2022 was a record year, with 44,196 orders. It …
