The production of industrial robots amounted to 16,080 in November 2019, with a year-on-year growth of 4.3 percent, maintaining positive growth for the second consecutive month, the first time for this occur since September 2018, according to statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics.

Experts said that the demand for industrial robots has seen a sharp decrease due to the decline of the automobile industry, but the trend of replacing human labor with robots still has strong momentum.

"Starting from 2019, the robotics industry has faced pressure, as some core technologies and key accessories are under the control of others. However, this is just the golden period for the optimization of the structure of the robotics industry to realize healthy development," said Luo Junjie, deputy director of the equipment industry department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Luo noted that the application fields and scenarios for the robotics industry continue to expand domestically, adding that the industry's development momentum remains strong.

The market scale for robots will maintain an annual growth of over 27 percent in the next three years, according to predictions by the China Centre of Information Industry Development (CCID).

Currently the applications of robots are mainly in the automotive and electronics industries, but huge potential still exists in other areas spanning metallurgy, light industry, metal processing, petrochemicals, food and beverage, as well as medicine and health.