- In today’s CEO Daily: Asia editor Nick Gordon reports on China’s robotics edge.
- The big story: It’s Budget Day in the U.K.
- The markets: In the black, globally.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Earlier this month, an engineer at electric vehicle maker Xpeng cut open the company’s new humanoid robot to dispel social media rumors that the life-like creature was a real person. “They told me that many people were saying there was a real person hidden inside,” Xpeng CEO He Xiaopeng said in a video posted to Weibo. “It is absolutely a real robot, right?” he said after the robot’s “skin” and webbed “muscle” were slashed to reveal its inner machine. The viral stunt is the latest evidence of China’s growing strength in robotics, especially the humanoid kinds that can already dance en masse to Chinese music and box in a ring.
Yet China’s strength in robotics goes beyond flashy spectacles. The country manufactures just over half the world’s industrial robots and installed more of them in its own operations last year than the rest of the world combined. Its innovation is as grand as the Baidu, WeRide and Pony.Ai self-driving cars zipping around Beijing, Shenzhen, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Barcelona and as humble as the robotic vacuum cleaner.
Take Roborock. Founded by a group of Xiaomi-backed engineers in 2014, the Beijing-based company has quickly surged to take over the home robot vacuum market once dominated by iRobot and Roomba. It’s now the largest robot vacuum brand in the world.
I recently talked to Roborock’s president, Quan Gang, about how China has managed to move so quickly in this space. “In China, we have a very comprehensive supply chain,” he explained, which helps make “design and production very easy, competent and efficient.” China’s intense competition is also driving robotics firms to upgrade fast.
A company like iRobot might take two years to bring a product to market, but Roborock can do it in six months, Gang claimed. (Roborock’s newest innovation is a vacuum with a robotic arm that can pick up your socks.)
More broadly, China sees robotics and AI as an opportunity to make its manufacturing more efficient, such as by allowing “dark factories” to operate through the night or using “factory brains” to reduce the time needed to make a product.
“You’ve got to be respectful of the fact that [the Chinese] are really innovating,” Wendy Tan White, CEO of U.S. robotics firm Intrinsic, told me last week. (White spoke at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur before flying to Taiwan to announce Intrinsic’s new JV with Foxconn.) She credited China’s experience and knowledge in robotics supply chains. “I wouldn’t ignore it. In fact, eventually we could learn from it,” she said.
One leading Chinese robotics startup—Agibot—will be joining us onstage at next week’s Brainstorm Design conference in Macau on Dec. 2. And, yes, one of its robots will be there too. More details here.—Nick Gordon
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top news
U.K. Budget Day
Chancellor Rachel Reeves will unveil the U.K.’s much-previewed annual budget in Parliament today as she seeks to boost growth and control spending. The plan is expected to include some tax increases on the wealthy as well as measures to address Britain’s cost of living crisis. Reeves’s ruling Labour Party controls Parliament by a large margin, but its popularity has sunk to historic lows.
Google’s Gemini 3
Analysts on and off Wall Street praised the release of Google’s Gemini 3 AI model that’s built directly into its search engine. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said he’s “not going back” to ChatGPT after trying Gemini 3. “The leap is insane,” he wrote on X. “It feels like the world just changed, again.”
Nvidia's nosedive
Meanwhile, Google's reported possible AI chip sale to Meta has seemed to spook Nvidia. Shares in the chipmaker sank 2.5% yesterday, and it defended itself on X: "Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry—it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”
Fed chair frontrunner
Kevin Hassett, the White House National Economic Council director, is reportedly President Donald Trump’s leading candidate for Federal Reserve chair as the search to replace Jerome Powell enters its final weeks. A close Trump ally, Hassett is likely to carry out Trump’s favored approach toward interest rate cuts, insiders told Bloomberg.
Campbell’s crisis
Canned soup maker Campbell’s is in crisis after its vice president of information technology was allegedly recorded saying that the company produces “highly processed food” for “poor people.” Campbell’s is defending its ingredients: “Campbell’s soups are made with real chicken. Period.”
Fewer manufacturing jobs
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report revealed that there were 6,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in September, meaning the U.S. has lost 59,000 factory jobs since President Trump’s Liberation Day tariff initiative in April. “It is striking how soft manufacturing has been because in theory, you put tariffs in place to protect domestic manufacturing, so that domestic manufacturing employment grows,” Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told Fortune.
Spending, not splurging
A new financial health report from the JPMorgan Chase Institute suggests that Gen Z and lower-income consumers may have “just enough to spend, but not enough to splurge” as the holiday season begins. The report also found that young people “continue to underperform the typical early career growth pattern” and that workers ages 50-54 are experiencing negative real year-over-year income growth.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are up 0.3% this morning. The last session closed up 0.91%. STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.4% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.26% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 1.85%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.61%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 2.67%. India’s NIFTY 50 is up 1.24%. Bitcoin was flat at $87K.
Around the watercooler
‘Dr. Doom’ Nouriel Roubini breaks with the crowd on the AI bubble, saying the U.S. is headed for a ‘growth recession’ and not a market crash by Eva Roytburg and Nick Lichtenburg
Ultrawealthy are looking to leave the U.K. thanks to tax hikes—but the CEO of $1 billion tax platform says it’s their ‘social responsibility’ to stay by Orianna Rosa Royle
Slack cofounder says workers and CEOs can get stuck doing ‘fake’ work like pre-meetings and slide shows by Emma Burleigh
CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Claire Zillman.
