Morgan Stanley forecasts 300x growth in the robot bearings market through 2050. Every motor in a robot requires at least one bearing. A humanoid robot requires 70 or more. OpenAI listed precision bearings as one of six critical robotics components. NSK Bearings Polska in Kielce is NSK Europe's largest plant, producing 15 million ball bearing units per month. Poland's smart manufacturing robotics market is valued at USD 1.2 billion. Poland is not an observer of the robotics revolution. It is inside the supply chain that makes it possible.
Morgan Stanley's research note on bearings as a robotics play makes a deceptively simple argument. The robotics market is large, growing fast, and deeply uncertain about which architectures, platforms, and manufacturers will ultimately dominate. Will humanoid robots become mass market by 2035? Will quadruped robots dominate logistics? Will collaborative robotic arms remain the primary industrial form factor? Nobody knows. The investment risk in any single robotics company includes the risk that its specific design loses to a competitor. The investment thesis in bearings removes that uncertainty entirely. Every robot that moves requires bearings. Every motor in every robot requires at least one. You cannot design around them. You cannot substitute them. You cannot in-source them without decades of precision manufacturing capability that most companies do not have. The bearing is the one component in the robotics supply chain that benefits from every design that wins rather than betting on which design that will be.
Morgan Stanley forecasts approximately 300x growth in the robot bearings market from current levels through 2050. To contextualise that figure: the global bearings market is currently worth approximately USD 100 billion annually. A 300x growth in the robotics-specific segment would represent tens of trillions of dollars of demand accumulating over the next twenty-five years, driven primarily by the deployment of increasingly complex robotic systems across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, defence, and consumer applications. OpenAI reinforced this assessment in a recent Request for Proposal for US-based hardware manufacturing capacity, listing precision bearings as one of six critical components in its robotics category, alongside motors, actuators, sensors, processors, and structural materials. When OpenAI is writing RFPs that specifically name precision bearings as a critical component, the signal about future demand is unambiguous.
1. Architecture-agnostic demand: Bearings are required regardless of a robot's ultimate design or form factor. Humanoid, quadruped, wheeled, flying, industrial arm. Every design that moves requires bearings at every joint and motor.
2. No viable substitution: Magnetic bearings exist for extremely high-speed applications but require active control systems, power supply, and are orders of magnitude more expensive. For the vast majority of robotic applications, rolling element bearings are the only practical solution.
3. Complexity multiplies demand: As robots become more capable and more degrees of freedom are added, bearing count increases non-linearly. Moving from a three-axis industrial arm to a humanoid robot increases bearing count from approximately 6 to 70 or more per unit.
4. Precision requirements raise barriers: Robot bearings are not commodity components. They require extreme tolerances, specialised materials, and manufacturing processes that take decades to develop. The top six global manufacturers control over 50% of the roller bearing market precisely because the barriers to entry are genuine.
The mechanics of why robot complexity drives bearing demand are straightforward once you understand how bearings function. A bearing is a mechanical component that reduces friction between two moving parts by interposing rolling elements, steel balls or rollers, between an inner race attached to the rotating shaft and an outer race attached to the housing. Every motor in a robot has a rotating shaft. Every rotating shaft requires at least one bearing to support the load and reduce friction to a level that makes the motor efficient and long-lived. In high-load or high-speed applications, two or more bearings per motor are standard.
The pricing dimension adds another layer of commercial significance. Individual bearings for robotics applications range from under USD 1 for simple ball bearings in non-critical applications to USD 100 or more for precision cross-roller bearings used in robot joint actuators where stiffness, accuracy, and load capacity are critical. A humanoid robot with 70 bearings at an average price of USD 30 per bearing represents USD 2,100 in bearing content per unit. At one million humanoid robots per year, which multiple companies including Tesla have stated as a production target within the decade, that is USD 2.1 billion in annual bearing demand from humanoid robots alone, before any other robot category is counted.
NSK Bearings Polska S.A. is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its foundation, with the core of what would become the plant located in Kielce, a town in South Central Poland around 110 miles south of Warsaw. Originally founded as a glass factory in 1897, it has grown over the years into a 286,000 sqm site which is home to more than 1,200 staff and produces in excess of 15 million ball bearing units per month, as well as an additional 30,000 cylindrical roller bearings.
The history of PPL in Poland goes back to 1897. Initially a glass manufacturer, they started producing bearings in 1959. NSK equipped the plant with production lines in 1973 and 1978, and then acquired the plant and the PPL brand in 1998. PPL is a very important part of NSK Europe. It is also the only member of the Group with a bearing in its logo. The PPL brand, Pierwsze Polskie Lozyska, meaning First Polish Bearings, is one of the oldest bearing brands in Central Europe and carries the distinction of being the only NSK group brand whose logo incorporates the product it makes. That heritage is not merely historical. It represents sixty-five years of accumulated manufacturing knowledge in precision bearing production at the Kielce site.
NSK Sales Director Maciej Piatkowski described Poland as the strategic hub for NSK's operations across Central and Eastern Europe, supporting manufacturing and bringing NSK's top-quality products and services closer to customers across Poland, Belarus, the three Baltic nations, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The Kielce plant's components end up in everything from transmission systems to washing machines to alternators, purchased by household name multinational companies across a range of industries. As robotics demand scales, that same manufacturing capability is directly applicable to bearing production for robotic joints, actuators, and motors.
Poland's Smart Manufacturing Robotics Market is valued at USD 1.2 billion, driven by automation adoption and Industry 4.0 initiatives, enhancing productivity in automotive and electronics sectors. In 2024, the automotive sector invested the most in robotics, accounting for 742 robotic applications, around one third of all installations completed in Poland during that period. The strongest growth came from the wood industry, where the number of new robotic applications increased by 63% compared with 2023.
The labour market pressure is the primary driver of this acceleration. According to PwC, the Polish market will lack 1.5 million qualified workers in 2025. With a low unemployment rate, maintaining Poland's economic growth will no longer be possible without supplementing the workforce with robots. That workforce gap is not a forecast. It is already visible in the labour market. Polish manufacturing wages have been rising consistently for a decade as the supply of industrial workers tightens. The economic case for automation has crossed the threshold of justification for a rapidly growing number of Polish companies.
| Sector | 2024 Robotic Applications in Poland | Trend | Bearing Implication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automotive | 742 (33% of total) | Dominant · stable | Industrial arms · welding robots · 20-40 bearings per unit |
| Wood and furniture | Up 63% YoY | Fastest growing | CNC and material handling robots · growing bearing demand |
| Electronics | Down 42% YoY | Cyclical decline | Precision assembly robots · will recover with electronics cycle |
| Steel and machinery | Down 18% YoY | Cyclical | Heavy industrial robots · high load bearings |
| Food and beverage | Growing | Consistent | Palletising and packaging robots · food-grade bearings |
| Logistics and e-commerce | Emerging | High growth expected | AMRs · conveyor systems · drone delivery · highest bearing intensity per sqm |
The global bearing market has a highly consolidated supply structure. The top six manufacturers, NSK, SKF, Schaeffler (FAG and INA brands), Timken, JTEKT (Koyo), and NTN, control over 50% of global roller bearing production by value. Chinese manufacturers, led by C&U, Wanxiang Qianqiao, and ZWZ, account for approximately 25% of the market, primarily in lower-precision commodity segments. The remaining market is served by hundreds of smaller regional manufacturers.
Poland's position within this structure is meaningful. NSK is Japan's number one bearing manufacturer in terms of sales and one of the three largest bearing producers in the world. In Poland, an important facility is located in Kielce, where NSK ball bearings and automotive components are manufactured, including steering system and gearbox parts. These products are exported to numerous European and global markets, forming an important part of the company's worldwide production network. SKF, the Swedish bearing giant and the world's largest producer by some measures, also has significant distribution and technical operations in Poland. Schaeffler's FAG brand has Polish industrial customers through its German manufacturing base. Poland is connected to the global bearing supply chain at the manufacturing level through NSK Kielce and at the distribution and technical services level through every major global producer that serves the Polish industrial market.
The Morgan Stanley thesis on bearings as an architecture-agnostic robotics play is compelling precisely because it removes the central uncertainty of robotics investing, which is which platform wins, and replaces it with the one certainty the robotics revolution does offer, which is that everything that moves will need bearings regardless of what shape it takes or which company makes it. A drone needs bearings. An industrial arm needs bearings. A humanoid robot needs seventy or more. A warehousing robot needs bearings at every wheel, actuator, and conveyor interface. The 300x forecast is not about any single robot form factor winning. It is about all of them winning simultaneously across a twenty-five-year deployment cycle.
Poland's specific position in this story is more interesting than it appears from the outside. NSK Kielce has been producing precision bearings since 1959 and is today NSK Europe's largest plant. The PPL brand has a history at that site going back to the factory's founding in 1897. The accumulated manufacturing knowledge, the quality systems, the workforce skills, and the supply chain relationships embedded in a 286,000 square metre facility producing 15 million bearing units per month are not assets that can be replicated quickly. They are the output of sixty-five years of continuous precision manufacturing development. When humanoid robot production scales from tens of thousands to millions of units per year, the plants that will supply the bearings are those with exactly this kind of established, certified, high-volume precision manufacturing capability.
For Poland's investment community, the domestic robotics market adds a second dimension. Polish manufacturers are automating at an accelerating rate because they have no choice. The labour market is too tight, wages are rising, and the competitive pressure from more automated Western European and Asian producers is intensifying. Every robot installed in a Polish factory is a bearing customer. At 742 automotive robotic applications in 2024 alone and thirty percent of Polish manufacturing companies planning robot implementation in the next three years, the domestic demand signal is clear. Poland is not watching the robotics revolution from the outside. It is manufacturing its components and buying its products simultaneously.
This article is produced by Fides Polonia Capital Management for informational purposes only. Bearing market data and robotics forecasts are sourced from Morgan Stanley research as summarised in publicly available notes, NSK Europe corporate communications, Statista, Ken Research, and US Trade.gov Poland robotics market intelligence as cited. The 300x robot bearing growth forecast is attributed to Morgan Stanley and represents their analytical projection, not a guarantee. Fides Polonia Capital Management has no financial interest in NSK Bearings Polska S.A., NSK Corporation, SKF, or any bearing manufacturer referenced in this article. Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice.