ABB’s latest quarterly results underline the challenges facing the company’s robotics business and, more broadly, the changing dynamics of the global automation market. In its Q3 2025 earnings report, ABB confirmed that its Robotics & Discrete Automation division remains under pressure, with management citing a “challenging discrete automation market” as a key factor affecting performance.
The figures arrive just months after ABB announced the sale of its robotics division to SoftBank Group, a move that is now seen in context as part of a broader response to market stagnation and shifting investment priorities within industrial automation.
Robotics faces headwinds
While ABB as a whole delivered solid results — an operational EBITA of USD 1.74 billion and a margin of 19.2 percent — the robotics business continued to lag behind. Demand in core markets such as automotive and electronics remains subdued, with customers deferring or scaling down automation projects.
The report characterizes the robotics segment as “hampered by weak demand in discrete manufacturing,” a trend also visible in the results of competitors like FANUC, KUKA, and Yaskawa. Capital-intensive sectors, especially those transitioning to electric vehicle production, have slowed orders as they reassess production footprints and investment cycles.
ABB’s robotics division, which generated about USD 2.3 billion in revenue in 2024, has seen declining profitability, with operating margins several percentage points below the group average. This underperformance helped pave the way for ABB’s decision earlier this year to divest the unit to SoftBank for USD 5.375 billion, a deal expected to close by mid-2026.
Repositioning the portfolio
In the Q3 statement, ABB emphasized its strategic focus on business areas with stronger and more predictable returns, including Electrification, Process Automation, and Motion. As part of that restructuring, the Machine Automation activities that once sat alongside robotics will be absorbed into the Process Automation division from Q4 onwards.
The divestment of robotics, ABB noted, will allow the company to concentrate resources on electrification infrastructure and digital industrial systems — areas benefiting from stable regulatory drivers and long-term demand for energy efficiency. ABB expects a non-operational pre-tax gain of approximately USD 2.4 billion from the transaction.
Reflecting a wider slowdown
Beyond ABB itself, the results echo broader trends in the automation sector. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) recently reported a slowdown in global robot installations for 2024, driven by higher interest rates, supply-chain disruptions, and slower capital expenditure in manufacturing.
Growth in robotics is now increasingly concentrated in software-based automation, AI-driven vision systems, and collaborative robots for logistics and service applications — segments less dominated by traditional industrial robot manufacturers.
Analysts view ABB’s divestment as a sign that the industry is entering a consolidation phase, where large conglomerates seek to streamline portfolios while technology investors move in to integrate robotics with artificial intelligence and digital twin technologies.
A market in transition
For ABB, the Q3 2025 results confirm the logic behind the strategic shift: robotics remains important to industrial transformation, but it no longer aligns with ABB’s near-term profitability goals. The company’s ability to post strong overall earnings despite weakness in robotics underscores the growing divergence between automation as hardware and automation as integrated digital infrastructure.
The report paints a picture of an industry in transition — one in which the next wave of value will likely be defined not by the number of robots installed, but by how intelligently they operate within connected, data-driven production systems.
