After earning $80 million in Q1 2021, the good times continued for Teradyne’s industrial automation group in the second quarter. On the backs of Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) and RBR50 winner Universal Robots (UR), the group’s revenue reached $92 million. That’s a 15% increase Q/Q, a 57% increase Y/Y and a 23% increase from Q2 2019.

UR‘s revenue was $76 million for Q2 2021, which is up 15% Q/Q and up 75% Y/Y. MiR earned $16 million, which is up 14% Q/Q and 41% Y/Y and up 51% from Q2 2019. The group’s revenue increased in all regions in Q2 over last year, with North America delivering the highest absolute revenue growth. The U.S. and Europe represented about 77% of the group’s revenue in the quarter, with China contributing about 14%.

“The longer-term outlook in our [industrial automation] business continues to brighten,” said Teradyne vice president and chief financial officer Sanjay Mehta. “We expect continued labor shortages to drive new applications for both our fixed and mobile robots.”

Teradyne expects the group’s revenue to grow about 40% for the year compared to 2020. Along with continued investments in engineering programs, Teradyne is also expanding support for distributors and sales to OEMs that integrate its robots into their products.

Teradyne CEO and president Mark Jagiela highlighted UR’s growth in welding applications. After entering the welding market about three years ago, he said welding applications have grown to be about 6% of UR’s global sales. The company is on pace to sell 1,000 cobots into welding applications in 2021, which is more than triple the pace from 2020.

“[Welding] is just one of many job categories with acute short-term and long-term labor shortages,” said Mehta. “Our strategy is to provide an open platform that creative developers can leverage to solve industry-specific labor shortages.”

Teradyne on The Robot Report Podcast

Greg Smith, president of Teradyne’s industrial automation group, was a recent guest on The Robot Report Podcast. He took us inside the goals and strategy of building Teradyne’s automation portfolio and what Teradyne is looking for in other industrial automation acquisitions.

Teradyne also owns Energid, a Bedford, Mass.-based company specializing in robot control software. Energid wasn’t mentioned in Teradyne’s earnings statement. However, Greg Smith, president of Teradyne’s industrial automation group, said Energid’s revenue is lumped into UR’s revenue figure.

“The main reason we bought Energid was to expand the total available market (TaM) for collaborative robots. Energid has done this in two ways already. The first was by creating remote TCP, a software add-on for UR. This has driven about 1,000 cobot sales for us. Energid also played a major role in ActiNav’s motion planning and perception capabilities. So Energid is playing a role in our revenue.”

UR won a 2021 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award for ActiNav as it simplifies machine-loading applications. ActiNav, which launched in April 2020, is a “plug-and-produce” UR+ application kit that makes it easier to deploy collaborative robots for common applications. UR recently launched a U.S. tour for ActiNav and named a select group of integrators to deploy the system across the country.

You can listen to Teradyne’s Q2 earnings call here and read a transcript of the call here.