ZURICH. China has blocked the takeover of ABB’s robotics business in China, and with it put a $5.4 billion sale to SoftBank in jeopardy. ABB said so on Thursday morning. The authority that reviews foreign investments for security reasons refused the Chinese part of the deal. Both companies say they remain in close contact and are still working, constructively, on the transaction. The shares did not take much comfort from the adverb. ABB fell about 1.7 to 1.9 per cent and sat at the bottom of the SMI.
The agreement itself is a year old in substance. In October 2025 ABB agreed to sell the robotics division to the Japanese group at an enterprise value of about $5.4 billion. China is the division’s largest market. More than 90 per cent of the robots ABB builds for Chinese customers are made in China. The group has run a robot factory in Shanghai since 2022, built for $150 million, in Pudong. A deal that cannot close in China cannot close as the deal that was signed.
What Beijing is reported to have feared
ABB’s own statement stops at the fact of the block. The Financial Times, citing people familiar with the review, reported the reasons Beijing was weighing. Officials feared that data from robotics production could leave the country and be used to train artificial-intelligence models, potentially including models from OpenAI, in which SoftBank holds a large stake. They also looked at whether intellectual property had to stay in China. A spin-off of parts of the business to Chinese owners was among the ideas examined, the paper said.
The same account says the refusal surprised SoftBank. As recently as last week the group had expected approval, and it is now assessing whether a fresh application is even possible. That is the operational question, and it is not one ABB can answer alone. A security review that has already said no does not become a yes because the seller would like the cash. It becomes a yes only if the structure changes enough to meet the objection, or if the politics change. Neither has been promised.
Why this sits on a Swiss share price
ABB is Swiss-Swedish, listed in Zurich, and the robotics unit is the piece of the group most exposed to Chinese factory demand. A blocked sale does two things at once to the equity story. It delays, and may erase, the $5.4 billion that was meant to leave the balance sheet and return to shareholders or to the rest of the group. And it leaves ABB owning, for longer than it planned, a business whose biggest plant sits inside a market that has just treated the buyer as a security problem.
The SMI touched a record above 15,090 on Thursday morning with ABB as one of its few large fallers. Construction stocks were bid. The robot maker was not. That is a useful distinction for anyone who read the record as a general all-clear on Swiss industry. Export controls and investment reviews have become part of the industrial P&L. This one landed in a single sentence from a Chinese regulator, and in a red print on a Zurich screen.
What is not decided
The transaction is impaired, not formally dead. ABB and SoftBank say they are still at work on it. A revised perimeter, with the Chinese factory carved out or parked with a local owner, is the sort of structure the Financial Times said had already been discussed. It would also be a different sale, at a different price, with a different argument to ABB’s own shareholders. Until there is a new agreement, or a cancellation, the right description is the one the company used: the multi-billion deal is in jeopardy, and the Chinese business is the reason.