I don't have much knowledge about robot conversion, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. When you've got a country that has been industrialized for a really long time, old equipment is going to be available and may be a viable option for what you want to do. Since this stuff costs a lot of money new, it can be worth fixing/modifying old stuff.
If a new television cost $10000 and was delivered a few months after you ordered it, you would be shocked if television repair shops weren't in every city, and people paid $2500 for used televisions that they could get next week.
At Warsaw Hackerspace we have a Bridgeport series I MDI machine that was retrofitted locally with LinuxCNC. Various vendors sold Bridgeport clones or retrofitted originals with CNC machinery.
We also have an Ex-Volkswagen KUKA robot - Volkswagen units are specific to Volkswagen and don't really work properly without "the gorilla and rest of the jungle" - in this case a Volkswagen factory line. But it can be driven in "human present" mode if you accept Volkswagen software limitations, and apparently quite a lot of places do just that.
If a new television cost $10000 and was delivered a few months after you ordered it, you would be shocked if television repair shops weren't in every city, and people paid $2500 for used televisions that they could get next week.