Schaeffler builds humanoid joints in Taicang as the parts map shifts east

A German supplier sets up next to its customers

Fact On February 27, 2026, Schaeffler registered Schaeffler Embodied Intelligent Robotics (Taicang) Co., Ltd. in Taicang, a city inside Suzhou. The new company was set up to make rolling bearings, planetary roller screws, precision gearboxes, motors and sensors, and to build custom linear and rotary drive systems for humanoid robot developers, Gasgoo reported.1

Fact Eight months later, on October 20, 2026, Schaeffler opened a roughly 7,500-square-meter Taicang facility with six humanoid robots working on a joint-module assembly line. The company added new orders from two Chinese customers in the third quarter, bringing cumulative humanoid robotics orders to €400 million, a figure that covers all of its humanoid business, not Taicang alone.2

Our read A German bearing maker chose to build its humanoid hardware next to Chinese robot makers rather than at home. For anyone selling a humanoid or a component into one, that choice says where the buyers, the engineering iterations and the price pressure are concentrated today.

How much of the chain sits in China

Fact Morgan Stanley's Humanoid 100 report, covered by China Internet Watch on February 10, 2025, put China's share of the global humanoid supply chain at 63% and its share of the body segment, the core hardware, at 45%. Of the listed companies the bank mapped, 73% of the humanoid makers sat in Asia, and 56% of those Asian firms were Chinese. Named body suppliers included Jiangsu Hengli Hydraulic, Ningbo Yunsheng, Zhejiang Shuanghuan Driveline, Hesai, CATL and Sony.4

Fact The same coverage gave a sense of why the parts count matters: Morgan Stanley's report described Tesla's Optimus as using 28 actuators and 50 degrees of freedom. Each actuator carries some combination of motor, reducer or screw, bearing, encoder and driver board, which multiplies every component decision by the joint count.4

Fact The older industrial-robot market shows the same drift. According to the International Federation of Robotics, China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, 59% of the world total, and Chinese suppliers delivered 195,000 of them, a 55% domestic share, CGTN reported on September 24, 2026. Installations by Chinese suppliers grew 15% that year, while foreign suppliers' installations in China grew 27%.9

Our read The 63% figure describes the chain as Morgan Stanley mapped it and says little about who earns the most per part, so it likely overstates China's hold on the most valuable components. It still matters for procurement. A US buyer's supplier-risk questionnaire will ask where reducers, screws, magnets and cells come from, and for most humanoids on the market the honest answer includes Chinese factories.

Our read Read the IFR numbers next to Morgan Stanley's. Chinese robot makers already win more than half of their home market for industrial arms, a business where Japanese and European brands led for decades, although foreign brands grew faster in 2025. The same factory buyers are now among the first customers for humanoids, and many of them already run Chinese-made arms.

The precision parts still carry Japanese and German names

Fact Nabtesco, the Japanese maker of RV-type precision reduction gears, says it holds about 60% of the global market for precision reduction gears, which are mainly used in industrial robots, according to its supplier profile.5

Fact Harmonic Drive Systems told investors on November 19, 2025 that it booked about ¥1.3 billion in humanoid-related orders in its fiscal second quarter and expected ¥2.5 billion for the year to March 2026, a figure it said could double or triple the following year. The orders came largely from North American clients making prototypes, and the company said it was talking to more than 15 potential humanoid customers, mostly in Japan. Its shares closed 8.2% higher that day, Investing.com reported.6

Fact The same Harmonic Drive briefing noted that orders from Chinese clients were down year on year, though that comment covered robots in general rather than humanoids.6

Our read ¥2.5 billion is a small line for a company of Harmonic Drive's size. The incumbents own the precision and the reputation, but their humanoid revenue is still prototype money. Chinese suppliers are booking the volume, and volume is where cost curves are set.

Our read The gap matters for anyone writing a spec sheet. A US humanoid maker that specifies a Japanese strain-wave reducer is buying lifetime data and a brand an enterprise buyer recognizes. A Chinese maker that specifies a domestic equivalent is buying price and lead time. Both can be the right choice, but the sales story has to match the part list, because the buyer's engineers will open the joint.

Scale borrowed from cars, lawn mowers and television

Fact China produced 12.89 million new energy vehicles in 2024, up 34.4%, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, as reported on January 15, 2025. The battery, motor and power-electronics base built for those cars is the same base humanoid makers now buy from.8

Fact Hesai, the lidar maker, shipped 239,273 robotics lidars in 2025, up 425.8%, on total revenue of 3.03 billion yuan, Gasgoo reported on March 25, 2026. Hesai will be the exclusive supplier of 10 million JT-series lidars for robotic lawn mowers sold under the Dreame and MOVA brands, and every Unitree humanoid on stage at the 2026 Spring Festival Gala carried its JT128 sensor.7

Our read A humanoid maker buying a JT128 pays a price set by lawn-mower volume. That is the structural advantage of the Chinese chain: sensors, cells and motors arrive pre-amortized by bigger consumer and auto markets, so a startup with a few hundred units gets component prices that a Western peer cannot match at the same scale.

Who serves whom, and what the customer tags miss

Fact Relationships run in both directions. Schaeffler made a minority investment in Agility Robotics in November 2024 and said it would deploy a significant number of humanoids in its global network of 100 plants by 2030, which makes it a supplier, an investor and a buyer at once.3

Fact Customer claims also need checking. In October 2025, reports that Sanhua Intelligent Controls had won a 50-billion-yuan Tesla order for humanoid components helped lift its A-shares nearly 60% between early September and mid-October. The company denied the order, Jiemian reported.10

Our read Supplier databases that tag a Chinese component maker as serving Tesla, Figure, AGIBOT or Unitree often rest on analyst notes and market talk. A sales team that cites those tags in a deck risks repeating a rumor to a buyer who has already heard the denial. Use only what the supplier or the OEM has said on the record.

What a sales team should do with the map

Fact Tariffs remain a live question rather than a settled one. On October 28, 2026, the President signed a Section 232 proclamation finding that imports of robotics, industrial machinery and their parts threaten US national security, but imposed no tariffs and directed Commerce and the US Trade Representative to negotiate with trading partners. Mayer Brown noted that the agencies must report progress within 180 days.1112

Our read That leaves a window of roughly six months in which a US buyer will ask about component origin without knowing the duty. Teams that can show a second source for reducers, screws and magnets, and say plainly where final assembly happens, will move through procurement faster than teams that wait for the rule.

Our read Final assembly location is the part of the story a robot company controls most directly. Moving it is slow and raises unit cost, but deciding in advance which units would be assembled where if duties arrive is cheap, and it gives a sales team a straight answer when a buyer asks.

Our read The Schaeffler move also changes who a Western component startup competes with. The German incumbent is now inside the Chinese cluster, at Chinese iteration speed, with €400 million of orders behind it. A startup pitching a better actuator to a US humanoid maker should expect to be benchmarked against Taicang pricing, not against a catalog price in Europe.