Exotec reflects on 10 years of warehouse automation, looks ahead to a new era

In October, Exotec SAS celebrated a decade of being in business. The Lille, France-based company’s Skypod system is deployed at more than 200 customer sites worldwide, joined by offerings including the Skypath conveyor system and the Deepsky warehouse execution system, or WES.

Skypod is a modular modular automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS). Exotec noted that it has manufactured and deployed more than 10,000 robots, eliminated 90 million km (55.9 million mi.) of walking for warehouse workers, and completed over 938 million cycles from racks to workstations under two minutes each.

Last month, the company released a study that found that nearly half of warehouse workers get pay raises in warehouses where they work alongside automation, particularly during the holiday rush.

It also named Renata Spada as chief people officer and promoted Aurelie Clerquin to executive vice president of finance. Exotec said this reflects its commitment to investing in talent as it expands beyond Europe, particularly in the U.S.

Andy Williams, executive vice president of sales at Exotec, spoke with Automated Warehouse about the company’s achievements and its outlook on robotics and the market.

What are some of the milestones of the past 10 years that you’re particularly proud of?

Williams: It’s pretty incredible to think back to 2015. It was not long after Amazon purchased Kiva, which was the impetus for several different companies to be created.

We’re proud of just simply executing. It’s very difficult to get across the chasm with new technologies, to get commercial traction and then to really scale. I’m most proud of the fact that we’ve been able to scale the business in a really meaningful way.

We were the first company in the ASRS space to get to $1 billion cumulative order intake, with sites worldwide, including about 50 in North America.

Exotec builds new ASRS and partnerships

How has Exotec’s technology continued to evolve?

Williams: We’ve remained very innovative. This year, we introduced a new generation of Skypod, which is a substantial improvement over something that was already very successful.

We’re implementing a lot of projects globally, and we’re definitely continuing to focus on our own integration business and supporting our integrators. We recently partnered with Bastion Solutions and E80 Group.

This year has been another one for unexpected world events and macro factors, but we’re adjusting. The good thing is, we’re in this for the long term. There’s no doubt about it.

Labor is still the top customer challenge

Speaking of challenges, what are your customers looking for right now?

Williams: The biggest single tailwind for our business is labor availability. It’s a major focus in all of customer engagements and for our existing customers as well.

How can these systems be optimized to the greatest extent possible to maximize the productivity of all the employees? You do it with a lot of flexibility.

This spans verticals, customer sizes, and geographies. Customers want optionality, because they don’t know what their channel mix or SKU proliferation will be one or two years from now and how that’s going to impact their business.

If you look at it from an engineering standpoint, it’s like sensitivity analysis overload. What if this channel increases by 50%? You can build out all kinds of permutations and different scenarios.

A lot of our customers have been affected by tariffs, uncertainty, and supply chain overhauls. That has impacted the momentum to place orders this year, but many people have delayed these decisions. It has been difficult, but I’m thankful that we’ve gotten a bit more clarity.

Trade and competition pose concerns

How has tariff uncertainty affected Exotec directly?

Williams: In our own business, we’re continuously improving our supply chain to mitigate the effects. This year, pretty much all of our racking and our totes are sourced from North America.

We can take advantage of different supply markets and maintain our quality to be nimble if and when tariffs change. I recognize that there have been trade imbalances that need to be fixed, but I think they can be an inhibitor to growth.

To modernize U.S. manufacturing, we’ll have to get robots from outside. We had to analyze the amount of steel in our products as a percentage of the total for an additional tariff, which has been around 15% with France. Do we make customers pay for it? At the end of the day, some stakeholders will have to pay more.

How is the global competitive landscape?

Williams: We’ve generally seen people raise their price levels this year, which is kind of unusual. Generally speaking, [robotics] is a value-based business where you’re working against ROI [return on investment], total cost of ownership, and stuff like that. But largely because of the Chinese push, there has been a lot more focus on the price level.

Exotec’s position is that we do have better technology and a stronger value proposition for our customers, though Chinese competitors have made leaps in their hardware offerings. As such, we’re focused on how we can embrace this competition and continue to differentiate ourselves in the market and drive the best outcomes for our customers.

If you’re willing to embrace competition, you have to scale up and optimize your supply chain. It’s heating up in a lot of ways in terms of scale and what companies are doing to compete globally. If startups can’t compete with performance and price, they won’t be around very long — customers want value.

Exotec focuses on tech and service

What are some key differentiators for Exotec?

Williams: We’re very staunch believers that, from a simple geometry or mechanical standpoint, we have the best product. It’s all about the software. We have some unique things that no one else is doing, like picking from one robot to another robot.

The European OEMs of the past built up some great businesses by being integrators. We can deliver value through conceptual elegance, software for the whole warehouse.

We also have the ability to partner with other best-of-breed robotics suppliers, for things like palletizing tied with our software. We’ve worked with Korber, Yaskawa, MHS, Tompkins, and others.

If you look at competitors such as AutoStore, Geek+, and Hai, they’re set up to be pure product companies and scale through external integrators. It’s all about features, specs, and price.

The integration side of our business is where we’re seeing the most value from the market, and people are signing up to do projects.

What are your own plans for scaling?

Williams: We have a plan in terms of headcount growth. We have some large R&D teams in France, which has tremendous talent. For instance, we couldn’t find enough software talent in Lille in Northern France, so we opened a software office in Lyon in Southern France.

We’ve also increased our North American team to around 150 now, and a lot of those folks are in software, supporting our projects here. One thing that has enabled Exotec to grow successfully is our relentless focus on culture.

You have to be willing to be dynamic and source employees from new locations. You want to make sure that the customers are satisfied.

Emerging technologies worth watching

What do think about the interest in artificial intelligence and humanoid robots?

Williams: AI is amazing, but it needs a use case designed by humans. We see lots of advancements in the pure software world, and there’s tremendous promise, but there’s also lots of talk.

I do see a lot of potential for digital twins. We’ve worked with NVIDIA and have talked with customers about how they can improve supply chain demand planning and reduce waste by getting products to the right place at the right time.

We’ve seen a lot of hype around humanoids at ProMAT. In the warehouse, if you can have a purpose-built robot for 10 times the performance at 10% of the cost, it will always have a massive role.

Humanoids are coming, but the question is, What are the use cases? We see some good practical ones for elder care, but they first have to cross the chasm and be validated — is the market willing to pay for them? It’s not yet clear where they’ll fit in the overall ecosystem.

What are your expectations for Exotec in 2026?

Williams: We expect companies to invest more and hope that the market will be more stable. For our business, I want us to execute on our strategy — not necessarily thinking bigger but better.

We’re also relying on our advanced software for next-generation capabilities. We’ll continue to partner with robotics companies and integrators where we don’t have offerings.

As we go down to midsize businesses, there’s more and more crossover between industrial and other automation. The tailwinds are strong for Exotec, and we’ve got to adjust as macro challenges come. I’m optimistic.