STIQ's research exists to help integrators and buyers evaluate the automated-warehouse market — who's winning, how fast it's growing, where the money is going. Read from the maintenance side of the building, the same numbers say something slightly different: not "should we automate," but "what does the equipment we're now responsible for actually look like, and where did it come from." A handful of figures from 2026 are worth knowing either way.
The market is bigger, and growing faster, than most headcount plans assume
STIQ's 2026 research puts the global system-integrator market — the firms that design and build these automated lines — at $34bn this year, on a 10% compound annual growth rate toward $49bn by 2030. Maintenance and reliability headcount plans rarely grow at 10% a year to match, which means the equipment base most teams are responsible for is set to expand faster than the people responsible for keeping it running.
One company just became the largest system integrator in the world
Toyota Automated Logistics posted $3,688m in 2026 revenue, per STIQ's Top-20 ranking, moving ahead of Dematic ($3,379m) and Daifuku ($2,835m) to become the largest global MHE system integrator by revenue. Knapp ($2,349m) and Symbotic ($2,247m) round out the top five.
For a maintenance team, that consolidation matters more than it looks. A small number of dominant vendors installing a growing share of the world's automated capacity means more facilities running near-identical asset classes, built to the same design conventions and the same manual structure — good news for anyone trying to build repeatable maintenance practice rather than reinventing it site by site.
Europe still builds more of this than anywhere else
Europe accounts for the majority of the combined revenue of STIQ's top-20 global integrators — a reminder that the manufacturers behind automated warehouse equipment are, for the most part, building and supporting it regionally rather than exporting it from a single hub. For a European maintenance team, that's directly relevant to something as practical as how far away the nearest OEM service engineer actually is.
The equipment is getting denser, not just more common
STIQ's 2026 goods-to-person research tracks the same underlying shift we've referenced elsewhere on this blog: fulfilment operations packing more SKUs and more automated assets into the same footprint, rather than simply adding more automation at the same density. For maintenance teams, that means less physical slack around each asset, less room to work around a stopped unit, and less margin for a preventive schedule that's running on guesswork instead of the manufacturer's actual specification.
Where Reliabilytics fits into this
None of this is a pitch for automating faster — that decision belongs to the people STIQ's research is written for. It's context for the people who inherit whatever gets installed: a market consolidating around a handful of dominant manufacturers, growing faster than most teams are staffing for, and packing more equipment into less space. We built Reliabilytics for that side of the building — reading the OEM manual for whatever gets installed, regardless of which of the top twenty built it, and turning it into a maintenance programme from day one.
We'll revisit these figures as STIQ publishes new research through the year. This is meant to stay current, not to be a one-time snapshot.