The method behind the used-robot price report and the values we use when arranging a fleet loan.
For each robot type, what a used robot sells for at each age, shown as a dollar value and as a share of its price when new. That curve is what a lender would recover if the robots had to be sold.
Listings. Asking prices for used robots on online marketplaces. One marketplace alone lists 28,258 used industrial robots. Asking prices run above sale prices, so we treat them as an upper bound.
Dealer sales. What dealers and refurbishers actually sell used robots for.
Auctions. Closing prices when fleets, factories or bankrupt companies are sold off. These set the floor a lender can count on.
Robots are grouped by type (for example industrial arms, collaborative arms, mobile robots, pallet movers, delivery and cleaning robots), and within a type by manufacturer and model wherever enough sales exist. Each fleet is priced robot by robot, never as one average.
The loan is sized below what the robots would resell for, so the collateral covers the debt as the robots age. In our example fleet, the advance is 70% of fleet value. The actual advance depends on the robot type, its resale history and the lender.
Until the price report is published, the year-by-year resale values shown on this site follow an example curve, not a forecast. They are marked with a note wherever they appear.
Our study covered 18 robot types and runs to 17 pages. In it, expected loss was 0.3% once robot company failure was removed, and 5.2% with all causes included. Lenders can ask us for the study summary through the lender form.