Inovance IR-S7 SCARA

The volume maker we were missing

Ask who sells the most industrial robots in China and the answer is no longer a Japanese company. Per IFR’s World Robotics 2025, China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, 54% of the world’s total, and domestic suppliers took 57% of that market for the first time. Estun, already in our catalog, leads the domestic pack. Inovance is the next name, and until today it was missing.

Inovance’s 2025 annual report, citing Frost & Sullivan, gives it 8.8% of China’s industrial robot shipments, fourth overall and second among domestic brands. MIR data reported by Tencent News earlier in 2025 had it third on the same share, with more than 20,000 robots a year. Rankings move with the source and the period. The SCARA figure does not: about 28% of the Chinese market and first place, against 27.3% in the MIR count.

Why the IR-S7

SCARA is where Inovance wins, and the IR-S7 is the mid-size machine in that line: 7 kg payload, 500, 600 or 700 mm reach, and a standard cycle time as short as 0.351 seconds. Inovance says that is over 10% faster than leading international brands. That is a manufacturer claim, and we could not find an independent benchmark. The page targets assembly and glue dispensing in 3C electronics, lithium battery, photovoltaic and display plants.

We chose it as the representative model because the company does not publish unit counts by model. It is the series whose job description matches where the annual report says volume sits. Inovance also sells larger SCARAs (the IR-S25 and IR-S50) and six-axis arms, and RoboDK dates the international range to SPS in December 2024.

What we could not verify

There is no public price. There are no named end customers. The annual report says six-axis robots were deployed at scale in battery, general industry and auto parts, and that overseas sales grew fast with top customers in Vietnam and South Korea, but it does not break out robot revenue. A reader should treat the 20,000-unit figure as a press-reported estimate, not an audited disclosure.

The LostJobs read

A SCARA does one thing well: it moves small parts quickly over a flat work surface. That is the motion of a phone, battery or solar-cell assembly station. Those stations are staffed by exactly the workers this catalog tracks, and the machine replacing them is increasingly a domestic Chinese one that costs less than the Japanese equivalent it displaced.

The cohort point is the useful one. Chinese brands went from about 28% of their home market a decade ago to 57% in 2024, and a single company holds roughly a quarter of the SCARA segment. If you work a dispensing, screw-driving or pick-and-place station in a battery or electronics plant, the question is no longer whether a SCARA arrives. It is which brand’s, and the answer is probably Inovance’s or Estun’s. The risk is concentrated where lines are new, and the exposure to people in older plants is slower, held back by retrofit cost rather than capability.