Industry Findings: Latin America’s automation landscape is being reshaped by expanding e-commerce operations, new fulfilment centers, and increasingly modernized manufacturing in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Buyers favour scalable robotic systems that integrate with warehouse and supply-chain platforms and can be supported regionally. Vendors offering financing, cross-border service teams, and adaptable deployment models capture multi-country rollouts as operators prioritize resilience and predictable throughput over lowest-cost components.
Industry Progression: Latin America is evolving beyond spot installs toward regional automation strategies driven by e-commerce and manufacturing upgrades: for example, in June 2024 a major investment by MercadoLibre in Brazil’s fulfilment centres signalled robotics scale-up across Latin routing circuits, elevating the importance of service-footprint, financing models and cross-country deployment capability in vendor selection within the region.
Industry Player Insights: Key companies operating in this regional market include ABB Robotics, FANUC Corporation, KUKA, Omron, Dematic, Vanderlande, and local integrators such as Grupo Microlab. Latin American procurement is shifting from pilot buys to chain-wide automation strategies; for example, in 2024 major retail and e-commerce players announced multi-site fulfilment upgrades that required standardized robot fleets, pushing vendors offering regional service footprints, equipment financing and interoperable WMS integrations to win repeatable, country-crossing contracts.