Market Overview

The work that business-use cleaning robots do is primarily the work currently inefficiently conducted by the humans at cruel environments.  There is no doubt that business-use cleaning robots can be effective for replacing human tasks.  Against this backdrop, a variety of companies have entered the market one after another from listed companies to the ventures.

The domestic business-use cleaning robot market in FY2017 is projected to achieve 767 million yen, 122.3 % of the size of the previous fiscal year, based on the shipment value at manufacturers.  Although the market has been on the rise, the size is still small.  As unit price of the products varies according to the use, those that have relatively high sales composition ratios are floor sweeping, floor cleaning and under-water cleaning robots.

Noteworthy Topics

In order to encourage wider use of business-use cleaning robots, both the makers and the users have challenges to solve.  What required at the makers’ side is improvement in product performance which may sometimes lead to potential functional development and also in usefulness.  What needed at users’ side is the readiness to accept robots and to build a structure to facilitate such acceptance, though the circumstances may be different according to the use.

Floor-cleaning and window-cleaning robots have room to improve, so that they have yet to mature as products.  On the other hand, the environment to accept the robots is incomplete at the users’ side, with little consideration of trying to utilize the maximum performance of the robots.  Though this cannot be helped, because the users have lack of experience of introducing any robots, they have to overcome their hardships or the robots cannot be widely accepted.

Research Outline