For years the exoskeleton industry has run on anecdotes: conference demos, pilot press releases, and vendor claims. China just replaced those with a number. In the first-ever measurement of the sector, research firm IDC counted roughly 26,000 exoskeletons shipped inside China in 2025 — a market worth more than 1.6 billion yuan, about $237 million, in a single year.
Three very different markets under one label
The IDC report, covered by Cryptopolitan and the Exoskeleton Report newsletter, splits the market into three segments — and the value distribution is the inverse of the volume distribution. Medical rehabilitation generated about 1.42 billion yuan but shipped only around 3,200 hospital-grade units. Consumer assistance shipped roughly 19,000 units — more than seven in ten of all exoskeletons sold — on just 110 million yuan, as lightweight hiking and walking aids dropped from tens of thousands of dollars to a few hundred. Industrial exoskeletons, used in warehousing, auto plants, power, and emergency response, landed in between at about 3,800 units and 80 million yuan. One vendor, RoboCT, was named by IDC across all three segments.
Rental legs on the Great Wall
The consumer volume is visible in public. Tourists can now rent lightweight exoskeletons to climb the Great Wall, and at Mount Tai the Taishan Cultural Tourism Group operates 500 units — the largest single deployment of the technology — with usage hitting 80% at peak season. Each device weighs 1.8 kg and runs about eight hours on a charge. Investors have noticed: 19 financing deals worth 2.2 billion yuan closed in 2025, up from eight deals worth 292 million yuan in 2024. Deutsche Welle cites projections that global exoskeleton revenue will pass $2 billion by 2030.
What this means for EHS and ops leaders
The lesson for workplace teams is not that consumer hiking aids are coming to your factory floor — it is that the supply chain behind them is industrializing fast. Falling component costs, mass manufacturing, and maturing rental models will keep pushing prices down for industrial devices too. If China's industrial segment grows from this base, the procurement options available in 2027-2028 will look very different from today's. One caveat: the US FCC's ban on imports of Chinese-made humanoid and quadruped robots did not name exoskeletons, but they ride the same supply chains now under political spotlight. Western buyers should weigh trade risk alongside price.
Sources: Cryptopolitan; Exoskeleton Report; Deutsche Welle; IDC (via ITHome)