As the first listed local robot company invested by Samsung Electronics, Rainbow Robotics was founded in 2011 by researchers at the Center for Anthropomorphic Robotics at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and owns the world’s first commercial bipedal walking robot “hubo 2”. As of the third quarter of last year, the company’s cumulative sales amounted to 10.4 billion won. Rainbow Robotics recently launched the research and development of the collaborative robot “RB Series” to expand its business area.

Industry insiders predict that Samsung Electronics’ latest investment is mainly to build a smart factory based on the RB Series. Yang Seung-yoon, a researcher at EUGENE Investment & Securities, said Rainbow Robotics plans to increase the number of collaborative robot products to nine by 2025, and is expected to provide collaborative robots for various fields such as electronics and logistics.

Samsung Electronics regards robotics as a future growth project, and Chairman Lee Jae-yong announced a three-year investment plan in August 2021, announcing that 240 trillion won will be invested in future new projects such as robotics and artificial intelligence, and the group has continued to increase investment in this field. At the end of the same year, Samsung Electronics’ Robot Business team (TF) was upgraded to the robot business team. At last year’s shareholders meeting, Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Han Jong-hee stressed that the first step in exploring new projects will be robots, which will become a new area of opportunity to connect with customers.
According to data from the Export-Import Bank of Korea, the global robot industry scale is about 25 billion US dollars in 2020, and is expected to increase to 160 billion US dollars in 2030, with an average annual increase of 20%. At present, the Korean robot market is still in the early stage of development, and whoever wins the first place is expected to dominate the entire market in the future. LG Electronics, another giant, also opened a new robot production line in Gumi in December last year to produce LG Chloe robots.