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Investing.com -- RBC Capital Markets sees humanoid robots emerging as one of the most transformative technologies of the coming decades, outlining a combined hardware and software opportunity that could reach roughly $12 trillion by 2050.
The brokerage estimates a $9 trillion total addressable market (TAM) for humanoid hardware, with an additional $3 trillion potential from software and services layered on top
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“In the coming decades, humanoid robots are expected to revolutionize industries and fill labor shortages,” RBC analyst Tom Narayan said in a Wednesday report. These robots are expected to initially thrive in areas such as industrial automation, warehousing, logistics, and agriculture, he added.
Household use is viewed as the largest long-term segment, though full-featured domestic robots may take more than 20 years to mature.
Narayan highlights China as the dominant geography, accounting for about 61% of the projected hardware TAM due to faster adoption, manufacturing scale, and supportive policymaking.
Unit costs could fall to around $25,000 as production scales, enabling broad deployment across households, factories, and retail environments.
Household demand alone is estimated to reach roughly $2.9 trillion, reflecting both high penetration potential and the likelihood that families may eventually own multiple units.
Narayan believes the economics of humanoids could mirror a hybrid of cars and smartphones. Robots would be sold as one-time capital goods, but ongoing software revenue—via app-store ecosystems and skill downloads—could become a major profit driver.
In an upside case, “software subscriptions and app sales could add ~$3T to the estimated ~$9T TAM,” creating a recurring, high-margin layer similar to Apple’s services model.
Competition remains wide open. The analyst stresses that “the humanoid robotics market is highly fragmented, with no clear leaders yet emerging.”
Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Unitree, UBTECH, Figure AI and Apptronik are identified as prominent players, though each is still developing core capabilities.
Chinese firms lead on hardware scale and cost efficiency, while the U.S. and Europe have an edge in software, autonomy and advanced AI.
RBC also outlines broad investment implications across the value chain, from sensors, actuators and cameras to operating systems, interoperability frameworks and design-focused consumer robotics.
While industrial and commercial applications are expected to scale first, Narayan sees long-term potential for humanoids to surpass the global auto fleet, given their ability to operate frequently and across a far wider set of tasks.