Name: ABB IRB 6700
Brand: ABB
Price: 90000 USD
Availability: Discontinued

Who's exposed

Jobs in the threat radius

industrial welder
palletizer / depalletizer
heavy parts material handler
foundry / forging operator
automotive body shop assembler

Deployment status

[Re-verified 2026-08-23: status changed from shipping to discontinued.] ABB's own product record states that production of the IRB 6700 has been phased out, that the full range of services including spare parts and technical support remains available, and that new purchases should go to the successors — IRB 6710, 6720, 6730 and 6740. ABB's commerce backend carries a DISCONTINUED lifecycle tag on this model, alongside legacy units such as the IRB 6640, IRB 6600 and IRB 7600, while current models including the IRB 6710 and 6720 carry no tag. That is a maintained lifecycle field, not a stale page. ABB's corporate product page for the IRB 6700 now returns a 404 and the large-robots category page lists only the four successors. The IRC5 controller the 6700 originally shipped with was itself phased out in June 2026; later units went out on OmniCore. What discontinued does not mean here is switched off: the IRB 6700 is the highest-installed tier of ABB's seventh-generation large robots, present across automotive body shops, foundries, palletizing lines and welding cells worldwide. ABB has never published unit counts, but a spare-parts commitment means those lines run for years yet. What ended is new orders, not the displacement. Separately and in the same window: ABB is selling its entire robotics division to SoftBank at a $5.375 billion enterprise value, announced October 8, 2025, reported as discontinued operations from Q4 2025, still awaiting EU, China and US regulatory clearance as of mid-August 2026, with closing expected mid-to-late 2026.

When this hits the labor market

This entry now records a retreat, but the thing retreating is a product line, not the jobs. The work the IRB 6700 covers — body-shop spot welding, heavy palletizing, foundry load and unload — was already automated in every plant that could carry the capital cost, and the phase-out changes none of that. A line that swaps in an IRB 6710 runs the same headcount. What matters is what the successors change: ABB says the next-generation large robots are faster and more energy-efficient at the same payload, and the OmniCore controller plugs into simulation and AI toolchains. So the displacement frontier does not move back with this generation change. It keeps moving out into the long tail as unit economics improve — smaller fabricators, regional welding shops, mid-volume lines still palletizing by hand. Three to seven years for those. For anyone already in one of these roles, the practical meaning of the phase-out is narrow: if the 6700 in your plant breaks, ABB will still send the part, but the next new line will carry a different model number and exactly the same logic.

The robot retired. The jobs it took did not come back.

In the August 2026 re-verification pass this entry moved from shipping to discontinued. The basis is ABB’s own language: production of the IRB 6700 has been phased out, spare parts and technical support continue, and new purchases should go to the IRB 6710, 6720, 6730 and 6740. That sentence sits on ABB’s product record, which also carries a DISCONTINUED lifecycle tag — shared with the IRB 6640, IRB 6600 and IRB 7600, and absent from current models like the IRB 6710. ABB’s corporate page for the IRB 6700 now 404s, and the large-robots category page lists only the four successors.

We are deliberately slow to retire an entry, because a retired slug leaves the re-verification queue for good. A successor model is not a retirement. A quiet year is not a retirement. This one counts because the manufacturer said “production has been phased out” in its own words, rather than because we inferred it from a site restructure.

Discontinued is not switched off

This needs saying plainly or the entry is useless. The IRB 6700 is the highest-installed tier of ABB’s seventh-generation large robots — automotive body shops, foundries, palletizing lines, welding cells, worldwide. ABB has never published a unit count, but the commitment to keep supplying spare parts and technical support tells you what matters: in industrial automation, that sentence means these installations keep running for years.

So for a welder or a palletizer, this status change carries no good news. Those stations do not revert to human hands because a model went out of production. New lines will simply carry a bigger number: the IRB 6710 and up, same payload class, faster, more energy-efficient, controller moved from IRC5 to OmniCore and wired into simulation and AI toolchains. IRC5 itself was phased out in June 2026.

An ownership note worth recording

Something larger is happening in the same window. ABB is selling its entire robotics division to SoftBank at a $5.375 billion enterprise value — announced October 8, 2025, carried as discontinued operations from Q4 2025, and as of mid-August 2026 still pending EU, China and US regulatory approval, with closing expected in the second half of the year. One of the big four industrial robot manufacturers is changing hands. It changes nothing for anyone on a line this quarter, but it belongs in the record: the ABB entries in this catalog may soon be citing a company under different ownership.

We also fixed a price we should not have published

This entry previously carried a $90,000 starting price attributed to a pricing blog written by a company that sells competing robots. That is not an ABB figure and it should never have been cited as a price source. We removed it in this pass. ABB does not publish list prices — its robots are quoted — and now that production has ended, the prices still findable online come from the used and refurbished market. An empty field is better than a number we cannot stand behind.