Forget the iPhone. The next big thing has legs, and it’s coming to Malaysia

 Chinese humanoid robot maker Agibot has pledged a potential RM1 billion investment here. After the PC and the smartphone, walking machines could define the next era.

What if I told you that the most important meeting Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim had in China last month wasn’t with officials of Alibaba, Huawei or Geely, but with a company that didn’t exist four years ago?

In Hangzhou, Agibot, a Shanghai humanoid robot maker founded only in 2023, pledged a potential RM1 billion investment in Malaysia by 2035 along with 5,000 jobs, according to The Edge. Sure, a potential pledge is not money in the bank, but the company making it is no minnow.

Agibot shipped more humanoids than any other firm last year – 5,168 of them according to research firm Omdia; and International Data Corporation (IDC), an American market intelligence firm, has it on top again so far this year. To boot, it rolled its 20,000th robot off the line in September. A company not yet old enough for kindergarten is out-building every rival.

I’ve spent years in the robotics industry, between Silicon Valley, Shenzhen and Singapore, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that the products which end up defining an era almost always start out clumsy, expensive and easy to laugh at, right up until they aren’t.

The personal computer, the internet, the laptop, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence (AI) all followed that script. Case in point: in 2007, Microsoft’s then chief executive Steve Ballmer told USA Today that “there’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Within a decade, Apple had become America’s biggest smartphone brand.

Today it’s driverless cars, with Alphabet’s Waymo giving more than 500,000 paid rides a week across more than a dozen American cities, and next, I would wager, comes the humanoid robot, the defining product of the next five to 10 years.

From stumbling to sprinting

If that sounds far-fetched, consider that in April last year, the winner of the world’s first robot half marathon in Beijing limped home in two hours and 40 minutes.

This April, a robot built by Chinese phone maker Honor completed the same race on its own, more than six minutes faster than the men’s world record. That’s right, in a single year robots went from stumbling to beating the best time any human has ever run. Let that sink in for a bit.

And this is no lone show pony. IDC estimates that nearly 25,000 humanoids were shipped in the first half of this year, up a whopping 432%, with Chinese makers building more than 95% of them.

Here’s the kicker: they’re getting cheaper at a mind-blowing pace. Unitree’s G1 launched in 2024 at 99,000 yuan (RM60,500), yet just over a year later its smaller R1 arrived at 39,900 yuan (RM24,400), less than half the price.

The Americans aren’t sitting still either, with Tesla saying it is converting part of its Fremont, California, car plant to make its Optimus robot, which Elon Musk calls “probably the biggest product ever”.

So how big could this get? IDC expects annual shipments to pass 750,000 by 2030, and Morgan Stanley reckons more than a billion could be in use by 2050.

Not quite ready for your living room

Mind you, none of these machines is ready to babysit your children, and electric vehicle news site Electrek reported that it could find no evidence Tesla built even hundreds of the 5,000 to 10,000 Optimus robots Musk had talked of making last year.

Even Agibot’s founder, Deng Taihua, has said that robots in the home face different challenges from those in factories, since they have to weave between furniture and everyday clutter. That’s precisely why factories and warehouses will come first, then hospitals and hotels, and only then the gloriously messy Malaysian home, shoes piled at the front door and all.

Why Malaysia should grab this with both hands

Six years ago, I wrote that jobs demanding dexterity in unpredictable surroundings were among the most resilient to automation for the next 20 years. With robots now loading car parts on a BMW line, I can’t help but feel I was far too generous with my timeline.

But here’s the thing: for Malaysia, that is mostly good news. We relied on about 2.1 million documented foreign workers as of October 2025 and the government has capped their share of the workforce at 13% and wants it down to 10% by 2030. Meanwhile, economy minister Akmal Nasrullah Mohd Nasir told Parliament this month that we will become an aged nation, with 14% of the population aged 65 and above, by 2048.

We’re short of hands and greying fast, and a machine that can lift, sort and fetch around the clock eases both problems. Agibot is already on the ground here, running an experience centre with developer I-Berhad at i-City in Shah Alam.

So what should Putrajaya do now? Get that “potential” RM1 billion signed, sealed and delivered. After Budget 2027, Treasury secretary-general Johan Mahmood Merican said the government was open to using foreign worker levies to “finance mechanisation”, and that money could help pay for the first humanoids on Malaysian factory floors, on condition that some of them were assembled here.

Agibot did not exist four years ago, and today it wants to spend RM1 billion in Malaysia. Give its robots five to ten more years and the question on our factory floors won’t be whether to hire one, but how soon we can do it. - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT