China runs 43.5% of the world's working industrial robots

Stock and annual installations measure different things, and the country rankings differ between them. Stock is the running total of robots still in service after years of buying and retiring units; annual installs are one year's purchases. China leads both, but its 43.5% stock share is the cumulative result, not a single year's demand.

The 4,663,773-unit base took decades to build, so it moves slowly. A country can post a strong install year and barely nudge its stock share, which is why a headline about who bought the most robots last year will not match this table. Read the table as a slow-moving inventory, not a scoreboard of who is buying fastest right now.

The United States and Korea both show 8.4%, and small rounding differences can flip that order between editions. Treat near-ties as ties, and do not read a one-place ranking swap as a real change in the installed base. Save the ranking language for the gap between the top three, which is wide enough to be real.

Cite China at 43.5% of the world's operational industrial robot stock, out of 4,663,773 units, and call it stock rather than a single-year install figure. The word stock is doing real work here, so keep it in the sentence.

Name the year the foreword covers, because the stock total climbs each edition and last year's number will read as stale next to the current one. When the next foreword lands, refresh both the total and the shares together, since they move as a set.

Watch the denominator: these are shares of the global operational base. Do not pair them with annual-installation shares, which rank countries in a different order and answer a different question about robot demand.

Reading China's 43.5% as its share of last year's robot sales. It is the accumulated operational stock built up over many years.

Ranking the US above Korea, or the reverse, on an 8.4% tie. The gap between them here is inside the rounding, so the fifth-place ordering is not something to lean on.

Adding stock shares to install shares from another page. They rest on different denominators and do not sum to anything meaningful.

We fetched the World Robotics foreword PDF and confirmed each share in its text: China at 43.5%, Japan at 9.7%, the United States and Korea at 8.4%, Germany at 6.0%, against the 4,663,773-unit global operational stock. The foreword is a free PDF with a text layer, so the numbers are greppable rather than locked in an image.

The country shares rate High because the foreword states them directly. We still flag that the two 8.4% entries are a genuine tie, so a reader should not present one country as ranked above the other.

Throughout, we kept stock separate from installation flow, since the most common error with this table is treating a decade of accumulated robots as one year's buying. Where a sibling page reports annual installs, it carries its own source, and we do not splice its shares into this one.