Exotec Skypod and the Attabotics collapse: what customers confirm

Exotec's Skypod robots, which drive on the floor and climb storage racks to bring bins to a picker, are in live use at named customers. The strongest proof comes from customers speaking for themselves. Japanese industrial distributor Trusco Nakayama announced on its own site in August 2026, in a release issued jointly with its integrator and Exotec's Japanese unit, that it had begun full operation of a Skypod system with 37 robots, 31,975 bins and four stations at its largest logistics center. Decathlon's UK logistics director told the BBC in March 2026 that the company's Northampton warehouse is "three times more efficient." The BBC reported about 100 robots there handling around 75% of items.

Almost everything else comes from Exotec. The company says it has sold about 14,000 robots and works at more than 200 sites for more than 75 brands. Its case releases carry customer quotes, but in every release Servospace reviewed, the throughput and productivity numbers sit in Exotec's own text, not inside the customer's quoted words. Servospace found no published price, contract value or payback figure in the releases, filings and articles reviewed.

The counterweight is Attabotics, a Calgary maker of a different robotic storage system that shut down in 2025. Its court file is the most detailed public record of what happens to customers when a storage-robot vendor runs out of cash: when it laid off most of its staff on June 30, 2025, it also suspended "service and warranty work," and its assets later sold for about C$7.7 million in cash, after it had raised about C$220 million. For a distribution center lead comparing goods-to-person storage vendors, the practical reading is this: Skypod is a real system that at least one large customer has rolled out across several sites, according to Exotec, but the public numbers are mostly vendor numbers, and vendor durability belongs on the same scorecard as speed.

Analysis based on Trusco Nakayama, Fast Retailing and Performance Food Group documents; Exotec releases, product pages and a vendor survey; joint releases with Decathlon, GXO, DSV, Dosenbach-Ochsner and First Supply; Attabotics court filings and trustee reports posted by Richter; a J.P. Morgan exhibit filed by Nordstrom; SEC full-text searches; and reporting by the BBC, AFP via Boursorama, Strategies Logistique, Robotics and Automation News, The Globe and Mail, The Grocer, BetaKit and Modern Materials Handling, all retrieved November 14, 2026. AI assistance was used in research and drafting, and the piece was checked by a separate AI fact-check and AI editorial review. Servospace did not interview the companies or customers or visit any site. Japanese and French passages are Servospace translations. Calculations are Servospace arithmetic on published figures and are labeled as such. Dollar figures for Attabotics are Canadian dollars unless marked. Last reviewed November 14, 2026.

In this analysis

• The short answer
• What kind of evidence each number is
• Trusco Nakayama: a customer-issued count
• Decathlon: seven sites, one customer voice with numbers
• 3PLs and other named sites
• Exotec company counts over time
• What the denominators show
• Attabotics: what the court file shows
• What Attabotics customers said
• What to ask a vendor
• Limitations
• What would change this assessment

The short answer

• Customer confirmed, live: Trusco Nakayama (Planet Aichi, Japan) in its own release, and Decathlon Northampton (UK) through its logistics director's on-record remarks to the BBC.
• Customer SEC material, no site or count: Performance Food Group lists "Goods to Person (Exotec/Dematic)" on a 2025 investor-day slide filed with the SEC.
• Joint or vendor releases with a customer quote: Decathlon's seven-site program, GXO for Guess, DSV, Dosenbach-Ochsner and First Supply. The customer quotes are real and attributed, but the throughput, robot-count and productivity figures in those releases are Exotec's text.
• Vendor only: company totals (about 14,000 robots sold, more than 200 sites, more than 75 brands), the PepsiCo Dallas system size, next-generation performance gains and station speed.
• Not public anywhere Servospace looked: price, contract length, uptime, a customer-published picks-per-hour rate, or any churned or decommissioned Skypod site.
• The failure case: Attabotics' court record shows service stopping, a going-concern warning months before the stop, customer prepayments on the balance sheet, and a sale of the technology to a new owner that restarted it in February 2026.

What kind of evidence each number is

Trusco Nakayama: a customer-issued count

The cleanest Skypod record is a release on Trusco Nakayama's own website dated August 4, 2026, issued jointly with integrator IHI Logistics Industrial Systems and Exotec's Japanese unit. It says Trusco has begun full operation (本格運用) of Skypod at Planet Aichi, which it describes as its 29th logistics center and its largest, at about 89,162 square meters. The system specification is listed in the release: 31,975 bins, 37 robots and four stations. Trusco says it uses the system to pick tools, consumables and safety supplies, and that it aims to grow from about 630,000 stocked items to more than one million.

What the release does not give is just as useful. There is no picks-per-hour figure, no labor comparison and no price. The 37-robot system is also small relative to the building, and Trusco says nothing about what share of Planet Aichi's volume it handles. A buyer can cite it as proof that a large distributor runs Skypod in production, not as proof of any rate.

Food distributor Mitsubishi Shokuhin also commissioned a Skypod system, at a new food-service center in Soka handling almost 13,000 product references, according to an Exotec announcement reported in October 2026. Servospace did not find a Mitsubishi Shokuhin release with figures.

Decathlon: seven sites, one customer voice with numbers

Decathlon is Exotec's largest named multi-site program. In a March 24, 2026 release, Exotec said its "Skyfleet" program covers seven Decathlon warehouses in France, the UK, Portugal, Italy and Germany, after a first Skypod system in Tilburg in 2021. It gave a typical site configuration and several results:

The Decathlon quote in Exotec's release, from Jerome Saillour, head of logistics automation, says Decathlon chose Exotec "because they were able to deploy many sites in a short time" and, "In five years, we have profoundly transformed the experience of our warehouse employees." It contains no throughput, robot-count or productivity figure. The capacity figures are a template for a typical site, not measured output at a named one.

The BBC report is the independent check. The BBC says the Northampton warehouse was largely automated in 2023 and that robots handle about 75% of items. Bell told the BBC that depalletizing went from 12 to 24 people to five or six while the outbound team went from six people a day to one or two. He said staff were moved to other roles. A GMB union official quoted in the same piece called no-job-loss claims "fanciful." The BBC article does not name the robot maker; the link to Exotec comes from Exotec's release, which lists Northampton as a Skyfleet site.

Two cross-checks do not line up neatly, and neither proves an error. First, Bell's own staffing numbers imply more than "three times": 50,000 items by 50 to 60 people is about 833 to 1,000 items per person per day, and 50,000 by 12 people would be about 4,167, or 4.2 to 5 times (Servospace arithmetic, assuming the 50,000 still applies, which the BBC does not say). "Efficient" may count other roles. Second, the BBC's 100 robots at Northampton is below Exotec's typical Skyfleet configuration of 150 to 200 robots per site. Exotec describes a typical setup, not a minimum. Both are questions for a reference call, not findings.

3PLs and other named sites

GXO, DSV, Dosenbach-Ochsner and First Supply are named, joint or vendor-hosted releases. Each of those has a customer quote; none of the quotes contains a throughput, robot-count or productivity figure. PepsiCo Dallas is an Exotec figure reported by Strategies Logistique, with no customer quote in that report.

The First Supply release is a labeling trap. Its subheadline says Skypod "led to a 10x increase in picking speed," but the body lists 10x faster picking, against manual processes, among "key expected business impacts." The First Supply executive quoted, chief logistics officer Steve Baer, says the system is "productive, efficient" and helps meet peak demand; he gives no multiplier. The release does say the site has run for "just over one year" and that next-day orders can be as much as 20% of the center's daily volume.

The GXO figure is labeled as a peak. A peak-hour line rate and a daily piece range cannot be combined into a sustained hourly rate without knowing hours run and pieces per line.

Two older customer records are thinner. Fast Retailing's November 2019 release announced a partnership with Exotec and said it "looks to initially automate one facility each with MUJIN and Exotec Solutions internationally." Exotec said in September 2020 that the technology was "under deployment in two warehouses in Japan, with 1,000 Skypods" for Uniqlo stores. Servospace did not find a later Fast Retailing statement with a count. Performance Food Group, a U.S. food distributor, listed "Goods to Person (Exotec/Dematic)" under warehouse automation in investor-day slides filed with the SEC in May 2025, with no site or count.

Exotec company counts over time

Exotec is private. Its totals come from releases and interviews, and they change label from one document to the next.

Three points follow. The robot count moved from 10,000 to about 14,000 between October 2025 and early February 2026, about 4,000 in four months, the same as the full-year production ceiling Exotec forecast for 2021 (Servospace arithmetic). The sources do not say whether both figures count the same thing, so a buyer should ask whether "sold" includes robots on order. "Sold" is also not "running," and no figure separates live, installing and retired systems. And the brand count rose from "more than 50" in June 2026 to "over 75" by September 2026 while the site count stayed at "200+." Gap Inc. is named in Exotec's 2025 boilerplate and in the Japanese boilerplate of the August 2026 Trusco release, but not in the English 2026 boilerplates Servospace reviewed. That is an observation about marketing copy, not evidence about Gap's systems, and Servospace found no Gap filing that mentions Exotec.

Revenue of about 340 million euros in 2025, up about 18% from 288 million (Servospace arithmetic), comes from company statements to reporters. Servospace did not retrieve Exotec's filed accounts and makes no claim about its profit.

What the denominators show

Dividing each stated total by its own stated denominator gives rough bounds. These are Servospace arithmetic, not measured rates.

Exotec also says its next-generation system gives 30% higher storage density and 50% more throughput per station, a claim cited in its 2025 IFOY award release. Servospace found no customer figure that tests it.

Attabotics: what the court file shows

Attabotics sold a different design, which it called robotic cube storage: a patented storage structure with robotic shuttles that use both horizontal and vertical space. It is not a Skypod competitor in every deal, but it is the closest recent case of a goods-to-person storage vendor failing, and its insolvency file, posted by trustee Richter, puts sworn numbers on the risk.

Four lessons follow for a buyer of any robotic storage system.

• Service is the exposure. Attabotics sold under fixed-price contracts covering the structure, robots, software, installation and "longer-term maintenance and troubleshooting." When the cash ran out, service and warranty work was suspended alongside the June 30 layoffs. Between August 23 and September 12, 2025, the trustee's cash report still shows $61,648 in "Installed Systems - Service and maintenance receipts," against a forecast of zero. The filing does not name which customers paid, or whether the cash was for ongoing support or prior invoices.
• Prepayments are at risk. The $11.2 million of deferred revenue on the March 2025 balance sheet is money recorded ahead of delivery; under the company's accounting policy that includes service amounts prepaid by customers. In an insolvency, a customer holding a prepaid contract is a creditor.
• The warning was in the accounts. The going-concern note in the 2024 statements came months before the shutdown. A buyer can ask any private vendor for its latest audited statements and auditor's opinion.
• The technology can outlive the company. Lafayette's cash price was about 3.5% of the equity Attabotics had raised (Servospace arithmetic). Attabotics said on February 10, 2026 that it would restart operations as part of LaFayette Systems, and that the Calgary facility would continue to house engineering, business and manufacturing. Modern Materials Handling reported manufacturing expanding at a LaFayette facility in central Kentucky. Whether existing customers were supported during the gap is not in the public record Servospace found.

What Attabotics customers said

Customer-owned statements are scarce, and the ones that exist are mostly about disputes and caution.

• Tesco told The Grocer in September 2025 that it would work with the buyer to evaluate the system, that it intended to test a single system at a single store, that it did not recognise a reported figure of 35 to 50 systems, and that it had no current plans for further installations.
• Canadian Tire reached a "confidential full and final settlement" with Attabotics in 2024 after a claim and counterclaim following a 2023 fire at a Canadian Tire distribution center. Canadian Tire said, as quoted by The Grocer, that "no findings have been made with respect to the cause and origin of the DC fire."
• Nordstrom did not name Attabotics in any filing Servospace found: an SEC full-text search from 2019 found the name only in Attabotics' own 2019 Form D and in one exhibit. That exhibit, a J.P. Morgan valuation deck prepared in December 2024 for El Puerto de Liverpool, then a roughly 9.6% Nordstrom shareholder, and filed by Nordstrom with the SEC in March 2025 as part of its going-private filing, lists "Attabotics impairments" among adjustments for 2019 to 2023, without an amount. That is a banker's label, not a Nordstrom statement.
• Others: The Globe and Mail reported Canadian Tire, Gordon Food Services, Pan Pacific Pet and Modern Beauty Supplies as customers; The Grocer reported that Modern Beauty installed the system at two warehouses. Servospace found no statement from those customers about how their systems fared.

What to ask a vendor

Exotec's own October 2026 survey of 250 U.S. and Canadian supply chain decision makers found that 94% said switching providers would be prohibitively expensive and 65% said total cost of ownership came in higher than expected. That is a vendor-commissioned survey, but its point cuts against every vendor, Exotec included: the choice is hard to reverse, so the questions above belong before the contract.

Limitations

This piece relies on what companies chose to publish. Joint releases were reviewed by both parties and select favorable results. The Decathlon results other than Bell's BBC remarks come from Exotec's release. Exotec's company totals come from interviews and boilerplate, not audited filings. Servospace did not retrieve Exotec's filed French accounts, and it did not find customer-published throughput for any Skypod site. Attabotics' financial figures come from sworn affidavits and trustee reports, which are reliable on finances but say little about individual customer outcomes. The Nordstrom and Canadian Tire items are a banker's label and a settlement statement, not findings of fault. AutoStore, the largest cube-storage vendor, is covered separately in AutoStore's installed base: what the count proves, and Symbotic in Symbotic and Walmart. For related customer-versus-vendor tests, see robotic piece picking and collaborative picking robots. More coverage sits on the warehouse robots topic page.

What would change this assessment

• A customer-published picks-per-hour or uptime figure for any Skypod site, including Decathlon, GXO, DSV or Trusco Nakayama.
• An Exotec count that separates live, installing and retired systems, or filed accounts showing profit or loss.
• A Fast Retailing, Gap Inc. or Oxford Industries statement on the size or status of its Skypod systems.
• Any report of a Skypod system being decommissioned or replaced.
• Attabotics or LaFayette Systems naming supported customer sites, or a former Attabotics customer describing its service experience.

Servospace will revisit this guide when one of those appears, and no later than March 2027.