North American companies ordered 10,989 industrial robots worth US$723.5 million in the third quarter of 2026 — up 24.8% in units and 26.1% in value on Q3 2025, and the strongest quarter of the year so far, according to new data from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), the industry’s main trade body. The order book didn’t just grow; it changed shape, and the shape matters more than the number.
Through the first nine months of 2026, orders stand at 28,984 robots worth about US$1.89 billion, up 9.6% in units and 13.3% in value year over year. After a soft first half, Q3 is the statement quarter — and per Rocking Robots’ report of the same dataset, the distribution is the widest of the year.
Car Parts First, Chips Second
The surprise is who is buying. Automotive component suppliers lifted orders 90.4% — the single biggest swing in the dataset — while automotive OEMs returned to growth at +7.5% after a weak first half, though they still sit 17% below year-earlier levels across the nine-month window. The parts makers, not the car companies, are the aggressive adopters right now.
Close behind: semiconductors, electronics and photonics orders rose 97.6%, which A3 ties directly to investment in US semiconductor manufacturing and demand for electronics supporting AI and other applications. Plastics and rubber grew 67.7%, life sciences and pharma 38.7%, metals 37.0%. All other industries managed just +0.5%, and food and consumer goods — the star of last year’s data — fell 23.7%.
Last Year’s Q3 Was the Mirror Image
The whiplash deserves its own paragraph, because the same dataset a year earlier ranked these sectors almost exactly backwards. Per A3’s Q3 2025 figures, food and consumer goods orders had jumped 105%, automotive OEMs rose 68% — and automotive component makers fell 25% while plastics and rubber dropped 35%. Twelve months later the parts makers are up 90.4% and food is down 23.7%.
Read that two ways. The optimistic read is a maturing market in which different verticals take turns leading, so no single industry slump can sink the order book — Shikany’s “diversified” framing, essentially. The sober read is that quarter-over-quarter sector rankings in this series swing violently enough that any one quarter’s leaderboard is mostly noise. Both reads agree on the underlying claim: the robot market finally has broad, broad-based demand rather than one automotive engine. That is the durable change; the specific percentages are churn.
“What stands out in the third quarter is not simply the magnitude of the growth, but how broadly it was distributed across the market,” said Alex Shikany, A3’s executive vice president, in the release. “That broader mix is important because it points to a robotics market that is becoming increasingly diversified across industries and applications.”
The Order Book Is a Leading Indicator — With an Asterisk
Robot orders are orders, not installations; they land on factory floors quarters later, and they can be deferred. A3 itself flags higher input costs, trade uncertainty and the timing of large manufacturing projects as watch items. The macro backdrop helps: the ISM Manufacturing PMI hit 54.5 in September, a ninth straight month of expansion, and Federal Reserve data shows manufacturing output up 0.3%.
The cobot numbers deserve their own line. Companies ordered 1,831 collaborative robots worth US$63.8 million in Q3, up about 56% year over year, and cobots took 16.7% of all units ordered in the quarter. Year to date, cobots are 43.8% of all robot orders in life sciences and 36.9% in semiconductors and electronics — proof that the light-touch robot is no longer a niche product. That tracks with what we saw in Universal Robots’ ground-up Gen 7 rebuild: the collaborative segment is where the incumbent vendors have decided the growth is.
The auto-parts spike is the part we’d watch rather than cheer. OEM orders spent most of two years in decline before this quarter’s flicker; suppliers jumping 90.4% reads less like a broad automation awakening and more like a backlog catch-up — the EV transition and tariff-driven reshoring both push parts makers in North America to automate ahead of demand. If OEMs follow through in Q4, the growth is real. If suppliers alone were carrying Q3, expect a weaker quarter-end print. One more tell: robot orders here are purchases of installed capacity, and A3’s own note says detailed segment data beyond the headline sectors is member-gated — so we’re reading the public silhouette of a dataset, not the full picture.
What It Means for New Zealand
There is a small but pointed signal for local manufacturers in here. A3’s diversified-quarter argument — automation spreading from automotive into semis, pharma and metals — is the same shape New Zealand’s own adoption should take, at village scale: food processing, hi-tech manufacturing, logistics. New Zealand firms don’t need 10,000-robot quarters; they need the confidence that mid-sized, targeted automation pays back. A market where nearly a sixth of all units ordered are collaborative arms is a market where entry costs keep falling. That is the pattern Factory automation-as-a-service startups are betting on — capacity as a subscription, no capex line. Watch whether Q4 holds the supplier pace.
Sources: The Robot Report; Rocking Robots; Business Wire (official A3 release, 403-blocked to this network — named, not counted).
