Posted on 10/26/2016 7:24:03 AM PDT by RitchieAprile
In 2011, Foxconn had announced a plan to replace 500,000 mainland Chinese workers with 1 million robots over the next 3-5 years.
Foxconn is the company that builds Apple's iPhone and iPad hardware and many of the android smartphones as well.
Foxconn, has so far installed 40,000 production robots across China as it looks to minimize the number of people it employs.
With the exception of some components like servo motors and speed reducers, the robots are being built entirely in-house, Foxconn's Dai Chia-peng told Taiwan's Central News Agency, as quoted by DigiTimes. It's unclear how many of the so-called "Foxbots" are being used to manufacture Apple products.
The machines are, however, said to be operating an industrial facility in Zhengzhou, a tablet plant in Chengdu, and computer/peripherals plants in Kunshan and Jiashan.
Dai commented that Foxconn is currently manufacturing 10,000 robots per year. Each one can potentially go far towards replacing human labor —in Kunshan alone, Foxconn is known to have cut 60,000 workers.
Thirty-five Taiwanese companies, including Apple’s supplier Foxconn, spent a total of 4 billion yuan (HK$4.74 billion) on artificial intelligence last year, according to the Kunshan government’s publicity department.
So it was robotics, artificial intelligence, process changes and demand changes that impacted the workforce.
As many as 600 major companies in Kunshan have similar plans, according to a government survey.
The job cuts do not augur well for Kunshan, which had a population of more than 2.5 million at the end of 2014, two-thirds of whom were migrant workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at nextbigfuture.com ...
Why outsourced to China is robots? We could just as easily make her own robots.
“Foxconn, has so far installed 40,000 production robots across China as it looks to minimize the number of people it employs.”
Next step will be for Vietnam and Cambodia to build cheaper robots to undercut prices even further and put the Chinese robots out of work.
there is a larger strategic issue to consider. If they decrease the number of human managers, the risk of catastrophic failure in these facilities will only increase. Moreover, an explosion, large scale accident or anything like that will not be easy to replace with another set of robots. I will bet that if you had two factories, one with a nominal amount of automation and lots of workers versus one almost totally automated, if both had the same accident, the less automated factory would be back to full production in far less time. Humans are still more adaptable than robots.
I wonder how many robots will buy I-phones and I-pads.
Exactly!!!
Low cost manufacturing could easily be brought into the USA by using robots.
Plus, jobs open up for Robot maintenance techs and design engineers.
The GOP-e would know this if any of them had a clue about High Tech.
Where will the Chinese children go now to make things for us westerners?
Welp, there goes the iPad factory suicide rate down the drain ...
You often read criticism of large companies exploiting third world workers (or third world child workers).
Our moral outrage is triggered by the meager living provided to those workers by those jobs. We react with negative publicity or legislation aimed at those low wages.
The real world outcome is for those low wage jobs to be restricted or eliminated. Unfortunately for the third world workers they just lose that low wage job; they don’t get their job turned into a high wage job, they just become unemployed.
I wonder what they would have to say about our moral outrage.
They know that the clock is ticking. With enough automation, the right geopolitics, and tax incentives, American industry could easily re-shore almost all electronics manufacturing back home. They know the time of the fully-automated phone factory is coming soon, and it could just as well be set up in west Texas as in Shenzhen.
Manufacturing will be coming back to the US but there will be fewer jobs in that sector. Otoh you will be able to start a factory in your garage with a leased robot.
A guy for whom I used did basically that in the sixties and he ended up with 6 plants. Multi millionaire.
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