Why JP Conte Views the Broadening of Robot Orders as a Signal, Not a Footnote
For years, the American robotics market was dominated by automotive demand. Car manufacturers bought the majority of industrial robots sold in North America, and that concentration made factory-automation investing cyclical by default. When auto production slowed, robot orders fell with it. That pattern has been changing, and JP Conte considers the shift consequential.
North American companies ordered 31,311 robots valued at $1.963 billion in 2024, flat in headline terms but different in composition. Food and consumer goods companies were the fastest-growing buyer category, with orders climbing 65% that year. Life sciences, pharmaceutical, and biomedical companies grew their robot purchases 46%. Automotive remained a notable buyer, but its share of total demand shrank as other sectors stepped in.
His reading of that data was examined in a Dataconomy profile of JP Conte published in July 2026. As managing partner of a San Francisco middle-market firm and founder of Lupine Crest Capital, Conte has spent three decades inside sector-concentrated private equity, with industrial technology among his four areas of focus. He views the diversification of automation buyers as a structural change rather than a temporary uptick. That compositional shift was built over several years across a range of industries, not produced by a single quarter’s order cycle.
The practical consequence for investors is reduced cyclicality. When a dozen industries adopt automation at different rates and for different applications, a contraction in any single end market doesn’t drag down total demand the way it once might have. A food packaging operation installing vision systems for quality inspection and a pharmaceutical manufacturer automating laboratory workflows are responding to fundamentally different pressures. For firms that hold industrial technology businesses through full economic cycles, that matters. JP Conte’s model requires underlying businesses to generate stable cash flows even when individual industries slow, and it’s a diversified customer base spread across food, pharma, consumer goods, and automotive that provides that buffer.