Shanghai STEP Electric Corporation

上海新时达电气股份有限公司

Shanghai STEP Electric Corporation (Xinshida) is an industrial automation company founded in 1995 and headquartered at 1560 Siyi Road in Jiading District, Shanghai. It has been listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange since 2010 under the code 002527. In June 2025 Haier Group made a strategic investment in the company, which now presents itself as the robotics ecosystem brand within Haier; its YouTube channel runs under the handle step_haier. The group also includes the German drive specialist Sigriner and the ADTECH brand.

STEP works in three areas. Smart elevators covers elevator control systems, human-machine interfaces, door systems, escalator controls and an elevator cloud service. General automation covers low- and high-voltage and special-purpose variable-frequency drives, servo systems, motion control cards, PLCs, I/O modules and special-machine controllers. The third area is robotics, which the company describes as a core focus built on its own motion-control technology. Products are sold to the electronics, battery, semiconductor, solar, automotive, logistics and HVAC industries, and STEP also offers robot system integration for customers in 3C electronics, semiconductors, automotive, machine tools and the water industry.

The robot portfolio, sold under the STEP and ADTECH brands, spans payloads from 1 to 600 kg. Six-axis articulated robots come in four series: SR general-purpose, SP palletising, SA welding and SD desktop. SCARA robots reach payloads up to 50 kg and standard cycle times down to 0.24 s, with high-speed, heavy-payload, cleanroom and screw-fastening variants. The SCR collaborative robot series covers 3 to 30 kg payloads. For semiconductor fabs STEP offers ten families of wafer-handling robots for 2-inch to 12-inch wafers, including atmospheric single-arm, dual-arm, multi-finger and aligner robots and vacuum single-arm and direct-drive robots, aimed at thermal processing, cleaning, etching, thin film, lithography, thinning and bonding tools.

Because STEP designs the control electronics itself, it also supplies robot controllers that are relevant to other robot builders. The SRC4 fourth-generation drive-control cabinet comes in SRC4S (STEP robots up to 25 kg) and SRC4L (above 25 kg) versions; the QC620 six-axis controller uses a dynamics-based acceleration algorithm that the company says cuts average cycle time by about 5%; the QC410B SCARA controller is more than 30% smaller and lighter than its predecessor and can be run from a PC without a teach pendant; and the VRC621 integrates vision, drive and control on the ARStudioX64 software platform with no-code UI design. Programming software and machine vision systems complete the line-up. STEP's robot factory was among Shanghai's first designated smart factories and has been recognised by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as a smart-manufacturing demonstration site.