The 24th of April 2020 Tokyo, Fukuoka, Japan ROBBO www.robbo.world launched two first robotic education clubs in Japan.
Due to the pandemic, lessons started in online format, ROBBO was one of the first companies at the Japanese market to offer distance courses on coding, 3D modelling and robotics.
In December 2019 educational robotics international manufacturer ROBBO registered subsidiary ROBBO Japan, the plan was set to open robotic clubs, located in Tokyo and Fukuoka in April 2020.
For the reason, that ROBBO Clubs’ network is growing mainly on franchise base, from 130+ clubs, working in Finland, Japan, Thailand and Russia, only 10% are owned by ROBBO company directly. Clubs in Tokyo and Fukuoka were opened by ROBBO Japan subsidiary and at the time ROBBO clubs are operating in distance lessons mode.
“The feature of Asian markets is meeting the business partner and negotiations long term period before the cooperation starts. We opened our own clubs to demonstrate the potential Japanese partners, that the format is prospective and popular in the country. Nowadays we are in the negotiations process with dozens of Japanese companies”. – commented Pavel Frolov, ROBBO Founder.
“This breaks stereotypes, but in Japan, there are a few so deep educational programs in robotics and coding for kids, as compared with international ROBBO company provides. Moreover, we see that few of them are offering online courses. This was confirmed by our potential partners’ market research, it was found out, that online education in robotics and coding market niche is almost free. Now we are active at this market segment and offer offline clubs and online schools’ franchise. ” – said Yasuo Ninomya, ROBBO Japan Business Development Director.
In the same time, ROBBO Japan team started to organise external robotic education events in Japan. ROBBO Club professional teachers provided one-week coding course, based on ROBBO sets within the frame of Winterfell Hakuba International Kids Camp at the beginning of April 2020. 11 kids took part in the project, the age was from 5 to 13, it was everyday lessons in groups or individually. On completing the course kids were able to write the own code with the several moving objects, including robots from ROBBO, and create own ROBBO fairy tale. Each participant got individual recommendations to continue the education.
ROBBO received an invitation from the Government of Japan to open a division in the country after it won the Fukuoka Startup Day technology project competition (May 2019) with the support of Ingria business incubator. At the CEATEC-2019 exhibition of advanced technologies, which was held in October 2019 in Japan, preliminary agreements were concluded with Japanese companies for the supply of ROBBO products worth more than 500 thousand euros in 2020.
Article submitted by
Maria Shipkova, Regional Manager
