Korea: Between Parts and Products, the Bet of Two Conglomerates
The land of HUBO buys an American robot and reaches for the parts as well. A look at the peculiar hand two conglomerates hold.
Between Parts and Products, a Peculiar Place
In Part 6, Japan was a quiet powerhouse that set down the spotlight of finished products and held the parts. So where does its neighbor Korea stand? Interestingly, Korea nurtures component ambitions like Japan, yet at the same time owns America's most iconic robot company, and its giant conglomerates have leapt directly even into the finished-product race — a peculiar place that does not fit neatly into any single box.
That peculiarity comes from three strands. The first is the technical legacy of HUBO, which conquered the DARPA contest in Part 1; the second is Samsung's bet on Rainbow Robotics, which carries on that legacy and makes parts itself; and the third is Hyundai, which embraced Boston Dynamics, as we saw in Part 5. This part looks at how these three strands set Korea in its peculiar place "between parts and products," and at what the blank spaces in that place are.
The Legacy of HUBO and Rainbow Robotics
Korea's humanoid story begins again from that scene in Part 1: in 2015, at the DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, the United States, when KAIST Professor Jun-Ho Oh's team won with DRC-HUBO+, beating the United States and Japan. That victory did not stop at a single moment of glory; it remained as an asset of humanoid engineering talent and know-how that Korea had raised itself.
The representative company that grew from those roots is Rainbow Robotics. Started from Professor Oh's laboratory, it makes collaborative robots and humanoids, and what is especially notable is that it makes its own precision reducer — the harmonic drive that Part 3 called the "costliest handful." To make in-house a key component once dependent on Japanese firms means that Korea aims not merely to assemble robots but to grasp the costly parts inside them as well.
The Bet of Two Conglomerates: Samsung and Hyundai
The real reason Korea is special is that two giant conglomerates have leapt directly into this field. First, Samsung Electronics steadily raised its stake in the Rainbow Robotics seen above, rising to the position of largest shareholder. The world's biggest memory-chip company, holding vast capital, marked the humanoid as a future business and effectively took into its arms a technology firm that even makes the parts.
The other axis is Hyundai Motor Group. As we saw in Part 5, Hyundai acquired America's Boston Dynamics in 2021, taking in hand the world's most iconic humanoid, Atlas, and its world-class motion-control technology. With the manufacturing capacity to mass-produce cars added to a finished-humanoid company, Hyundai is walking, in its own way, the very road Tesla pursues — "the carmaker's humanoid."
Korea's Real Weapon: Vertical Integration
Step back from this picture and Korea's real weapon appears: the potential for vertical integration, whereby one country, even one business group, can fill almost every layer that makes up a robot. While the United States leans on Asia for parts and Japan stays within parts alone, Korea holds at once the possibility of filling everything from the finished product to the key components with the hands of its own firms.
As the figure above shows, on the Samsung side stand Rainbow Robotics, which makes humanoids and reducers, Samsung SDI for batteries, and Samsung Electronics for memory chips; on the Hyundai side sit Boston Dynamics, which has the finished robot Atlas, and Hyundai Motor with its vast manufacturing capacity. Add to this battery powerhouses like LG Energy Solution and reducer firms like SBB Tech and SPG, and Korea becomes a rare country that can fill almost every part and finished product of a robot's body with its own firms.
Korea's Blanks: AI and the Market
Yet the figure above has one deliberately left-blank cell: the very top layer, the artificial intelligence that forms the robot's brain. As we saw in Part 5, the large AI models that train today's robots and the center of that ecosystem are still in the United States, and Korea, strong as it is in semiconductors and components, stands a step behind on the front line of the AI that runs above them.
Another blank is the size of the market. The United States has vast venture capital and China an enormous domestic market and wholehearted government support, but Korea is relatively small in both. In the end Korea's contest hinges on how quickly it can turn the strengths of conglomerate capital and vertical integration into actual products and AI competitiveness — and in this, Korea is a country holding possibility and challenge at once.
The Final Stage: China
From its peculiar place between parts and products, Korea makes its bet with the weapons of conglomerate capital and vertical integration. The legacy of HUBO, the parts of Rainbow Robotics, the finished product of Boston Dynamics, and even batteries and semiconductors. It holds a wider net than any other country, yet how it fills the blanks of the topmost AI and the size of its market remains the question.
Now the final stage of this series remains: China. The country that, applying the logic of volume and price seen in Part 2 to its entire domestic supply chain from finished products to parts, is catching up the fastest. What weapon China has drawn against America's capital and AI, Japan's parts, and Korea's vertical integration, we continue in the next and final part.
- Part 1 · History — From Clockwork Automata to ASIMO and HUBO
- Part 2 · The Giants of Today — Atlas, Optimus, Figure, Unitree
- Part 3 · The Engineering — Locomotion, Actuators, Reducers, AI, Batteries
- Part 4 · The Stock Value Chain — Where the Robot Turns into Money
- Part 5 · United States — The Giant Shaking the Board with Capital and AI
- Part 6 · Japan — The Quiet Powerhouse That Holds the Parts
- Part 7 · Korea — Between Parts and Products, the Bet of Two Conglomerates
- Part 8 · China
References · Sources
- Materials on KAIST DRC-HUBO+'s 2015 DARPA win and on Rainbow Robotics' collaborative robots, humanoids and reducers.
- Disclosures and reporting on Samsung Electronics' increase of its stake in Rainbow Robotics.
- Materials on Hyundai Motor Group's acquisition of Boston Dynamics (2021).
- General materials on batteries (LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI) and reducer components (SBB Tech, SPG).
Image credits
- KAIST DRC-HUBO+ (DARPA 2015) — U.S. Navy / John F. Williams, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Boston Dynamics Atlas — DARPA, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.