In 2016, Chinese appliance giant Midea bought KUKA, Germany's legendary industrial robot maker, for around four and a half billion euros, roughly five billion dollars, one of the largest Chinese takeovers of a German company ever. German politicians panicked. Midea promised the A in KUKA would always stand for Augsburg. Nine years later, that promise has quietly expired. This is the story of how China paid a fortune for the crown jewel of German robotics, then built the thing that made it almost worthless. While KUKA sat inside its guarantees in Bavaria, a company from Nanjing called Estun, founded by a former forestry lecturer named Wu Bo, quietly mastered its own controllers, servo drives and reducers, and by 2025, according to MIR Databank, had climbed to the number one robot brand sold in China, ahead of ABB, Yaskawa and FANUC. Now KUKA is cutting up to 560 jobs in Augsburg, has lost 100 million euros in orders, and is eyeing Hungary. KUKA, Midea, Estun, Inovance, Cloos, Volkswagen, industrial robots, China versus Germany.
