Doosan Robotics will make its first day of trading on Thursday after raising 421 billion won ($310 million) in South Korea's largest initial public offering (IPO) this year. Doosan, headquartered in Suwon, is South Korea's largest manufacturer of collaborative robots. Its issue price is 26,000 won per share, which is at the upper end of the issue price range. The company said retail investors subscribed as much as 33 trillion won, setting a record this year.
Doosan Robot H series robots
Robots have long been used in industry to complete repetitive tasks, but Doosan Robotics mainly makes robotic arms that work with humans to complete tasks from beyond the factory floor. These collaborative machines are already being used for everything from making coffee and cooking fried chicken to pouring beer and handling luggage at the airport.
"This is a market that is starting to take off," Chief Executive Officer Ryu Junghoon said in an interview with Bloomberg News.
Doosan Robot plans to use the funds raised from the IPO for strategic acquisitions and overseas expansion. Ryu said the company's strategy is to build a diversified business with robotic arms, rather than making humanoid robots.
Doosan is also experimenting with using artificial intelligence (AI) to make robots more powerful. In August, the company reached an agreement with Microsoft to use its Azure OpenAI service for GPT-based robot control systems. After integrating GPT, users can give simple voice commands to prepare one or two dishes, and the robot can figure out the best process for cooking.
Douglas Kim, an analyst who posted on the SmartKarma platform, said Doosan Robot's stock price may rise sharply when it begins trading on Thursday. Rainbow Robotics, one of Doosan's closest competitors, currently has a market value of about 3 trillion won, while Doosan Robot's IPO price corresponds to a market value of about 1.7 trillion won.
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