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Les Dîners de la robotique · N°1

Robots: produce or import? A question of sovereignty

October 2026 · Paris

For its first Dîner de la robotique, A.S.I.M.O.V. hosted Benjamin Haddad, Minister of State for Europe, together with fifteen figures from the world of robotics: public officials, industrialists, researchers, investors and journalists. One question was on the table: should Europe build the robots it needs, or import them? The discussion was held under the Chatham House rule: the ideas are reported, no remark is attributed.

59 % of the industrial robots installed worldwide in 2025 were installed in China.
1 in 30 one maintenance job created for thirty positions removed, in the worked example presented at the table.
99.9 % the success rate a production line demands, when a demonstration congratulates itself on 90 %.

Seven lessons

  1. The real subject is productivity, not the robot market.

    The French market will stay the size of a sector. What justifies the effort is productivity that has stopped rising, demography that is about to withdraw hands, defence, and the financing of an ageing population.

  2. China's lead owes more to scale than to technological breakthrough.

    A vast domestic market, a deep pool of engineers, close ties between universities and industry, and a plan that sets volumes.

  3. On catching up, nothing was settled.

    For some, the cost gap cannot be closed. For others, contracts already won against the best Chinese manufacturers prove the opposite. In the absence of public data on actual performance, the question remains open.

  4. From demonstration to factory floor, there are two orders of magnitude.

    A video is content with a 90 % success rate; a production line demands 99.9 %. The humanoid fleet in France is still counted in tens of units.

  5. Dependence does not disappear, it moves up a storey.

    Building the robot in Europe leaves dependence on magnets, gearboxes and chips. Conversely, integration, maintenance and operation, which can account for close to half of a project, stay local.

  6. The jobs being created do not offset the jobs disappearing.

    Fleet supervision, maintenance, diagnostics: these jobs call for no engineering degree, and nobody is training for them yet. Social acceptability will decide the pace of adoption as much as the price of the machines.

  7. On financing, two questions rather than one.

    The scale of the public effort was discussed, and so was its destination: the money available does not always find a taker.

The full cahier

Cahier no. 1, « Ce que l'Europe doit produire, ce qu'elle peut importer » (What Europe must produce, what it can import), takes the discussion chapter by chapter and sets it against the public data.

Download cahier no. 1 (PDF, 22 pages, in French)

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