UR and MiR consolidated R&D facilities and headquarters in 2024. Source: Universal Robots
Economic uncertainty has taken a toll on the robotics industry, including leading vendors. Teradyne Inc.’s robotics group laid off 10% of its global workforce this week. Teradyne owns Universal Robots A/S and Mobile Industrial Robots ApS, leading developers of collaborative robot arms and autonomous mobile robots, respectively.
It’s unclear exactly how many employees were affected by the restructuring. However, Teradyne Robotics says on its website that it has 1,400+ employees worldwide. The 10% reduction includes a 6% layoff in Denmark, where both Universal Robots (UR) and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) are headquartered.
“The robotics industry in general has been going through a rough patch,” Ujjwal Kumar, group president for Teradyne Robotics, told The Robot Report.
“UR declined 3% year over year, and MiR grew 1% year over year,” he said. “We outperformed the market, which had double-digit declines.”
Demand for robotics didn’t meet expectations because of the post-COVID slowdown in capital, wars affecting trade and labor, and uncertainty among manufacturers, said Kumar. “I’ve been in the industrial world for more than 25 years, and I’ve never seen this sort of pullback in core low-mix, high-volume manufacturing,” he said.
“Last year was one of operations consolidation for UR and MiR, and we’ve improved the quality and cost of our goods and on-time delivery for new products,” Kumar added. “Our playbook is to outperform the market, driven by innovations, channel transformations, and new verticals.”
Teradyne reports ‘restructuring’ of sales, marketing, services
In its earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2024, Teradyne acknowledged that its robotics business was slow in comparison with its core testing business.
“The industrial automation market continued to be weak in Q4,” stated the North Reading, Mass.-based company. “In 2024, we combined UR and MiR operations into a unified robotics operations group.”
“Now in Q1 of 2025, we are consolidating our go-to-market functions at the robotics level to enable our best partners to sell the full UR and MiR product line and to serve our customers better with a single customer-service organization,” Teradyne said. “This restructuring increases our efficiency and reduces our robotics breakeven revenue from $440 million in 2024 to $365 million in 2025.”
The company said that its total robotics revenue was $365 million for 2024, with UR contributing $293 million and MiR $72 million.
Kumar said that Teradyne is consolidating UR and MIR’s sales, marketing, and support teams after focusing on new products in the past year.
“Up to 55% of MiR’s partners are also UR partners, and so is 55% of its revenue,” he explained. “In the old structure, we had an account manager for each one calling on the same OEMs (manufacturers), GSIs (global systems integrators), and distributors. We had an opportunity to eliminate some overlap, skill up customer service, and expand regional coverage.”
“Services had a similar overlap, with different product lines,” Kumar added. “By combining forces, we’ll have better coverage of every geography for tech support and repair services under multiyear service contracts.”
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Universal Robots moves from new products to new markets
Last year, Teradyne said it launched a record number of new products to grow its serviceable addressable market (SAM). They included the MiR1200 pallet jack with artificial intelligence for pallet detection, cleanroom-rated robots for semiconductor manufacturing plus food and beverage, and the MC600 mobile cobot.
Universal Robots also increased the payload capacity of its UR20 and UR30 arms through software updates. It continued to roll out its PolyScope X platform and began collaborating with NVIDIA on combining AI with its cobots. Meanwhile, We fleeper enterprise offered fleet management for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).
“We needed a leaner commercial organization to have continued focus on new product launches and to have better coverage with large accounts and OEMs,” said Kumar. “Key verticals for us include logistics and warehouse, as well as semiconductors thanks to things like Teradyne’s new relationship with ADI (Analog Devices Inc.). We’re launching a focus on food and beverage and pharmaceuticals.”
The MC600 is designed for reliable mobile manipulation, says MiR. Source: Mobile Industrial Robots
Kumar still bullish on global growth
While Teradyne expects slower to flat growth in the first half of 2025, Kumar was still optimistic about prospects for Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots.
In December, Universal Robots opened its first production facility in China, with new models for that market, the UR7e and the UR12e.
“We believe the Chinese market is turning the corner,” noted Kumar. “We believe that segment now values better-performing, quality ecosystem-based offerings, and we’re building on that hypothesis. We have big growth plans.”
At the same time, growing labor shortages in manufacturing, warehousing, agriculture, food processing, and construction should boost demand for automation in North America and Europe.
“We’re in talks with with major companies across the U.S.,” Kumar said. “The advanced robotics space — which is more collaborative and for high- to medium-mix jobs — can also help where industries need to redeploy people continuously. Those are exactly the kind of jobs the new generations of cobots and AMRs can step up to help.”
As trade show season begins, Universal Robots will continue to exhibit with its UR+ ecosystem partners, as seen in its UR Collaborate event this week.
“We’re not pulling back on our presence at these events,” asserted Kumar. “Our growth focus is on new product launches, and we’ll need to talk about new applications and solutions with customers.”
“Mobile manipulation is an incremental growth driver,” he said. “We launched two products last year, and we’re in all of the same human-scale applications as humanoid robots but with more capable, affordable mobile cobots.”
“We’ll keep bringing in more AI-based solutions to expand the application space,” Kumar said. “2025 will be a pivotal year for us in the advanced robotics industry.”
Editor’s note: Steve Crowe contributed to this article.
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