It seems that the global financial crisis, which affected almost all industries in a negative way in the recent years also hit the robotics industry. Overall, worldwide stock performance of robotic stocks over the last four years has been disappointing.

Here are some figures and a chart provided to us by Robo-Stox™ of Therobotreport.com :

• Robotic industrials are still down 28% from their 2007 highs and did poorer than the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is also still down 8.5%.

• Service robotic stocks are down 15% from 2007 while the NASDAQ is down just 2.5%.

• Industrials took a big fall from their 2007 highs with the doubly whamy of the collapse of auto sales and bankrupcies of auto companies. A small rise in the latter part of 2010 was blown away with the Japanese disasters, Thailand floods and EU economic turmoil.

• Publicly-traded service robotics companies fall into three main sectors: medical, defense/security and a mixture of academic and consumer niche products. Medical robotic stocks are booming; defense/security stocks are holding steady; and the remainder are all over the place.

• Industrial robot companies represent 62% of the $9.3 billion industry revenue; service is 38% of which 75% was for military/defense.**

See the graph below (click on it to see it bigger):

We would like to thank to Robo-Stox™ by The Robot Report for providing us the information and the chart above.

It is interesting to see according to this chart that the service robots industry has been affected to a lesser degree than the industrial robots, and especially more recently, it looks like may be starting to recover, even if the industrial robotics is still showing no positive signs. This may suggest that consumers are starting to realize the real life uses of the robots as they become more and more available and pay for them no matter what the current economic situation suggests.

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