Ecovacs (科沃斯) is one of the few Chinese consumer-tech names that has been a robotics company from the start — it launched the first sweeper and window-cleaning robots in 2006 and has now served more than 38 million households worldwide. In the first half of 2026 the group booked RMB 10.341 billion in revenue, up 19.18%, and RMB 1.248 billion in net profit, up 27.40%, with overseas business at 49% of brand revenue — 51% in the second quarter, the first time it has passed the domestic market. A visit runs one full day in Suzhou's Wuzhong district, built around the museum Ecovacs funded in 2016 and two seminar blocks.
The itinerary, hour by hour
09:30–10:10 — Guided tour of the Chuangxiang Robot Museum (创想机器人科技馆), inside the Ecovacs campus. 10:10–12:00 — Keynote seminar: 'The Road of Ecovacs' Transformation, Upgrading and Innovation'. 12:00–13:30 — Lunch and break.
13:30–13:50 — Film. 14:00–16:00 — Second seminar block, and this is the part you steer: the topic is set to what your group came for — marketing, management, organisational innovation, talent and organisation, corporate culture, or factory operations.
The museum: six halls
The museum was built by Ecovacs in 2016 as the first robot-themed museum in China, and it holds machines from China, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan and Korea. Six core halls: a history of robotics area, a smart-living hall that stages robots in a simulated home, an interactive experience hall, a technology-application hall, a robotics lab and a film hall. The smart-living hall is where the commercial point lands — the housekeeper robot and the window-cleaning robot are not prototypes behind glass, they are staged in the rooms they were designed for.
The two seminar blocks
The morning session is fixed: how a company that started in floor cleaning ended up running four robot categories, and what broke along the way. The afternoon is yours. That combination is the reason the day works for mixed delegations — the strategists take the morning, the operators take the afternoon, and everyone leaves with the same vocabulary.
Why Ecovacs is worth a day
China accounts for more than 30% of the global robot-vacuum market and Ecovacs has been No.1 there for eleven straight years. In 2025 the brand shipped 4.4 million service robots, up 49.1%, with overseas revenue up 52.0% to 45.4% of the total. In the first half of 2026, service-robot shipments rose 44.1%, new-category overseas revenue rose 75.1%, and home-robot shipments overseas grew by more than 80%. The company sells into close to 180 markets and runs sales subsidiaries in Germany, the United States, Japan and Singapore.
The new categories were born outside China
Lawn-mowing and pool-cleaning robots are not products China asked for. Europe has the stronger lawn-robot demand and the bigger market; the United States has the pool-robot market. That is the recurring theme worth raising in the room: Ecovacs is not designing for an abstract 'global market', it is designing for specific lives in specific places. The window robot took more than a decade — the last two years outsold the previous ten combined.
The three-question test behind every category
Ecovacs' head of global product, Wu Qi, frames each category decision as three questions: is the demand rigid, is the technology ready, is the timing right. The filter underneath is simple — robots should take on work that is repetitive, basic and mildly hated. Timing is the hard one: arrive too early and you become a martyr, too late and you are only following.
If your group picks factory operations
Choose factory operations for the afternoon and the discussion goes to the part that does not show up in a product launch. The director of smart manufacturing, Wang Xiaolei, puts the difficulty in consistency rather than assembly: structure, materials, tolerances, process, testing and suppliers all have to be fixed, then trial production, ramp-up and yield improvement follow — and the four product families share neither a structure, components, assembly process nor test standard, which is why manufacturing now runs in parallel with design. A product takes roughly six to nine months from design through development. Logistics director Chao Ran makes the same point downstream: a robot leaving the factory is only half the job, followed by country versions, packaging, certification documents, customs clearance, overseas warehousing and last-mile delivery.
The Nanxun park
Alongside the Suzhou campus, Ecovacs is laying out a roughly 1,000-mu park in Nanxun. The company frames it as a bet on the future rather than a response to the current order book — service robotics getting bigger and adding categories. It is a useful thing to raise in the seminar: what does a company build for when it does not yet know which category will need it.
Globalisation is, in the end, localisation. Only doing each market well counts as being global.
Where it is, and what it pairs with
The museum sits inside the Ecovacs campus in Wuzhong district, Suzhou — roughly half an hour by metro from the city centre and about the same again by high-speed rail from Shanghai. That makes the day easy to bolt onto a Shanghai or Hangzhou programme for teams who want consumer hardware, AI and e-commerce operations in one loop.
Questions delegations ask before they go
Do we need to be in robotics or appliances? No. The day suits consumer-hardware brands, manufacturing and operations teams, and anyone working on how to extend one product into a portfolio.
How long is it? One full day — roughly 09:30 to 16:00 — with lunch included in the schedule.
Is English interpretation provided? Yes. English interpretation on site is part of how the programme is run.
Can we choose the afternoon topic? Yes. Marketing, management, organisational innovation, talent, corporate culture or factory operations — tell us which and we set the session around it.
Arranging your Ecovacs visit
We arrange the visit for you end to end: the introduction to the host, the scheduling on the Chinese side and English interpretation on site. Tell us your dates, your delegation size and what you want to see, and we will confirm what can be arranged. Start at chinatechvisits.com/company-visits.