Doosan Robotics’ blockbuster IPO—the biggest in Korea this year—shows that the robot stock craze has well and truly arrived
2 min
Our future looks increasingly robotic—whether we like it or not. But the investment craze in robotics stocks may already be getting ahead of itself.
The latest example: South Korea’s Doosan Robotics, whose shares nearly doubled in value on their first day of trading Thursday. The company, which is part of the conglomerate Doosan Group, raised around $300 million from an initial public offering, making it Korea’s biggest IPO this year so far.
Doosan makes collaborative robots, or cobots, designed to work together with humans on factory floors. Such robotic helpers are most suitable for smaller companies that may not be ready to automate their whole production line but use cobots to automate processes better done by machines. Apart from its heavy-duty industrial robots, Doosan also makes variants that can serve coffee—and beer.
Doosan isn’t the only robotics company looking frothy of late. Shares of its smaller peer Rainbow Robotics, which is backed by Samsung Electronics, have more than quadrupled this year. Samsung raised its stake in Rainbow to 15% in March.
To be fair, there are plenty of good reasons to be optimistic about industrial robots. Poor demographics and poisonous immigration politics in most advanced economies will mean weak labor-force growth in the future. Robots rarely go on strike. And in the U.S., the enormous surge in manufacturing investment—courtesy of the Inflation Reduction Act and other industrial policy bills—means demand for manufacturing workers could remain strong for quite a while. Reshoring to advanced economies is another tailwind for robotics.
In 2022, almost 60% of Doosan’s sales came from North America and Europe. Though cobots are still a small part of the overall robot market—accounting for 7.5% of industrial robots installed in 2021, according to the International Federation of Robotics—shipments have been growing faster than the market as a whole. Installations for all industrial robots grew 5% year on year to a record high in 2022.
The company is the seventh-largest maker of cobots globally, according to its prospectus. But since the top two companies, Denmark’s Universal Robots and Japan’s Fanuc, dominate the sector with nearly half of the market, Doosan’s market share amounted to only 3.6%.
Doosan has been growing fast: Its sales more than doubled to around 45 billion won, the equivalent of $33 million, in 2022 from 2020. But it isn’t cheap. With a market capitalisation of around $2.5 billion, Doosan now trades at 74 times last year’s revenue. Fanuc trades at just 4.7 times revenue. Doosan is also unprofitable, though its chief executive expects it to move into the black next year.
The robot craze, like the artificial-intelligence craze, is grounded in real technological trends—and demographic ones too. But like human workers, not all robot firms are created equal. Jumping aboard the robot stock bandwagon at any price might not serve investors over the long run.
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The U.S. now has more billionaires than China for the first time in a decade, driven by AI and a booming stock market.
3 min
The number of U.S. billionaires in the world reached 870 in mid-January, outpacing the number in China for the first time in 10 years, according to a snapshot of the wealthiest in the world by the Hurun Report.
The U.S. gained 70 billionaires since last year, powered by a rising stock market, a strong dollar, and the insatiable appetite for all things AI, according to the 14th annual Hurun Global Rich List . China gained nine billionaires overall for a total of 823. Hurun is a China-based research, media, and investment group.
“It’s been a good year for AI, money managers, entertainment, and crypto,” Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, said in a news release. “It’s been a tough year for luxury, telecommunications, and real estate in China.”
Overall, the Hurun list—which reflects a snapshot of global wealth based on calculations made Jan. 15—counted 3,442 billionaires in the world, up 5%, or 163, from a year ago. Their total wealth rose 13% to just under $17 trillion.
In November, New York research firm Altrata reported that the billionaire population rose 4% in 2023 to 3,323 individuals and their wealth rose 9% to $12.1 trillion.
Elon Musk, CEO of electric-car maker Tesla and right-hand advisor to President Donald Trump, topped the list for the fourth time in five years, with recorded wealth of $420 billion as of mid-January as Tesla stock soared in the aftermath of the U.S. election, according to Hurun’s calculations.
The firm noted that Musk’s wealth has since nosedived about $100 billion, falling along with shares of Tesla although the EV car maker is benefiting on Thursday from Trump’s 25% tariff on cars made outside the U.S.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk’s wealth stood at about $336 billion as of the market’s close on Wednesday, although measuring his exact wealth —including stakes in his privately held companies and the undiscounted value of his Tesla shares—is difficult to precisely determine.
The overall list this year contained 387 new billionaires, while 177 dropped off the list—more than 80 of which were from China, Hurun said. “China’s economy is continuing to restructure, with the drop-offs coming from a weeding out of healthcare and new energy and traditional manufacturing, as well as real estate,” Hoogewerf said in the release.
Among those who wealth sank was Colin Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings —the parent company of e-commerce platforms Temu and Pinduoduo—who lost $17 billion.
Also, Zhong Shanshan, the founder and chair of the Nongfu Spring beverage company and the majority owner of Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise , lost $8 billion from “intensifying competition” in the market for bottled water. The loss knocked Zhong from his top rank in China, which is now held by Zhang Yiming founder of Tik-Tok owner Bytedance. Zhang is ranked No. 22 overall.
Hurun’s top 10 billionaires is a familiar group of largely U.S. individuals including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison. The list has France’s LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault in seventh place, three notches down from his fourth ranked spot on the Bloomberg list, reflecting a slump in luxury products last year.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is ranked No. 11 on Hurun’s list as his wealth nearly tripled to $128 billion through Jan. 15. Other AI billionaires found lower down on the list include Liang Wenfeng, 40, founder and CEO of DeepSeek, with wealth of $4.5 billion and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, with $1.8 billion.
Also making the list were musicians Jay-Z ($2.7 billion), Rihanna ($1.7 billion), Taylor Swift ($1.6 billion), and Paul McCartney ($1 billion). Sports stars included Michael Jordan ($3.3 billion), Tiger Woods ($1.7 billion), Floyd Mayweather ($1.3 billion), and LeBron James ($1.3 billion).
Wealth continues to surge across the globe, but Hoogewerf noted those amassing it aren’t overly generous.
“We only managed to find three individuals in the past year who donated more than $1 billion,” he said. Warren Buffet gave $5.3 billion, mainly to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while Michael Bloomberg —ranked No. 19 with wealth of $92 billion—gave $3.7 billion to various causes. Netflix founder Reed Hastings, ranked No. 474 with wealth of $6.2 billion, donated $1.1 billion.
