South Korea uses more industrial robots per worker than any other country

This chart shows one way to compare automated manufacturing across countries — it plots the number of robots per 1,000 manufacturing employees.

The chart shows very large differences between countries. South Korea stands out, with more than one robot for every ten manufacturing workers.

Singapore comes second, and Germany and Japan rank third. The United States sits in the middle, below Sweden, Denmark, and Slovenia.

This perspective shows industrial robot adoption in relative terms. In another Data Insight, I looked at robot adoption in absolute terms. From that perspective, China stands out by a large margin: it’s a large economy with a huge manufacturing sector, and it has by far the largest stock of industrial robots.

Much of this expansion has happened recently: China’s annual installations increased 12-fold over a decade.

Update

The original version of this Data Insight was published on February 14, 2026, showing data for 2023. A few weeks later, the International Federation of Robots published data for 2024, which included a revised estimate for China, based on “updated labor market data issued by China's National Bureau of Statistics”. We updated the chart and text of this Data Insight on May 5, 2026, to reflect the new ranking.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “South Korea uses more industrial robots per worker than any other country” by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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