Transport's 47% Share: What It Means for Your First Robot

Which robot should a facility team consider first?

Transport and logistics robots led professional service robot sales in 2025. According to IFR World Robotics 2026, the category sold 117,500 units, up 21% from 2024, for a 47% share of professional service robot sales worldwide. That headline is accurate as a sample result, but it describes suppliers in aggregate, not the floor of any single building.

For a facility team, the more useful question is narrower. Which task consumes the most labor on your floor, and which task causes the most visible trouble when it slips? If the answer is hauling goods, carts or supplies along repeated routes, a transport robot belongs near the top of the list. If dirty, dusty or wet floors get missed between shifts, a cleaning robot probably comes first.

Either way, the first unit should be scoped by what your site actually does, not by a worldwide category total.

What did the 47% figure actually count?

IFR reports that transport and logistics robots reached 117,500 units in 2025. According to IFR, these robots are used mainly to move goods and automate material flows and delivery processes. The IFR press release headline says 117,000, but its body text and other coverage give 117,500, so 117,500 is the figure to cite.

The sample matters as much as the count. All figures come from a sample of 238 service robot suppliers. IFR says the data is not projected to the whole industry, and because the sample changes from year to year, comparisons across reports are discouraged. A 47% share describes how sales were distributed across that sample. It does not describe how many robots your market needs.

How does cleaning rank in the same data?

The rest of the ranking helps. Supply Chain 247, reporting on IFR's presentation, put hospitality second with about a 14% share and professional cleaning third with about a 12% share. Cleaning sales were reported to show growth of 40%. No verified 2025 cleaning unit count was available for this piece, so none is stated here.

Why transport leads is partly a matter of reasoning. Transport robots tend to suit repeated, mapped routes with clear labor content. A cleaning robot's work is spread across many small floor passes, often in overnight or between-shift windows. Those are interpretations of how the work is structured, not findings IFR states, and they help explain why the two categories show distinct sales patterns.

How does the category total compare with one site?

IFR also reports that professional service robot shipments rose about 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025. Against that total, a 47% transport share does not mean half of your neighbors chose transport robots. It means that across the surveyed suppliers, transport units made up the largest slice of professional service sales.

A single site sees one set of floors, one set of routes and one labor gap. A distribution center with long aisles and heavy pallet traffic has a case for transport that a clinic with busy waiting rooms does not. Neither should copy the national mix. The category total shows where vendors sold units. Your shift log shows where staff hours go, and that is the number worth trusting first.

How should a team decide between transport and cleaning first?

Score the two candidates on the same facts before any vendor demonstration. Each item below asks for something your team can measure, not a general benefit.

• Hours per shift spent hauling goods or supplies along the same routes, logged across a representative stretch of shifts.
• Floor areas that are missed, late or skipped when the night crew is short, and how often that happens.
• How cleanly the route or floor can be mapped, including clear aisles and how many temporary obstacles appear each week.
• Which task your staff would most want returned to them, since that task usually decides the first slot.

What does a first robot look like on a real floor?

The first unit should be small enough to prove the case. Many teams start with one leased unit, run it through a phased deployment with no shutdown, and add units only after route or floor coverage holds up. That approach fits a 3-year lease, with one fixed robot lease payment quoted after a site assessment.

Service Robot Co. works this way. We complete site assessment mapping, then quote a fixed robot lease payment on a 3-year lease. We stay OEM-neutral, choosing the robot that fits the job across manufacturers, then handling financing, deployment, operator training and service through a nationwide US engineer network. The aim is one partner for the whole lifecycle, from the first survey to the service call after go-live.

Fit matters for either choice. A facility that starts with transport may later add overnight floor care as a second unit. A facility that starts with cleaning may find that a warehouse cleaning robot lease or autonomous mobile robot leasing belongs on the list later, once goods begin moving through the same space.

Where do the numbers stop?

Treat every figure here as a sample result. IFR's totals describe 238 suppliers, the 47% share describes sales mix in that sample, and the 40% reported growth for cleaning comes through a press summary rather than a unit count this piece could confirm.

Before a team commits, measure the candidate tasks on your own floor for a fixed period, then set those results beside the fixed lease payment quoted after assessment. A category leader can point you toward a question. Only your site can answer it.