“As 2011 grows closer to conclusion, Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, has big plans for 2012,” Chris Chang reports for M.I.C. Gadget.
“The company aims to build more plants in inland regions to reduce labor costs, and most interestingly, 300,000 robots will be added to the assembly line but will not lay-off any workers according to comments made by founder and chairman Terry Gou,” Chang reports. “Gou said that the company will produce roughly 1,000 robots a day to perform routine and riskier jobs such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers. Adding 300,000 robots to the assembly line won’t affect current staff, and guess what, Foxconn currently has 10,000 robots; in the next year, this number should jump to 300,000 and up to 1 million in the next three years. You may ask, how were the robots built? Ok, there’s a ‘robot kingdom’ in Taiwan.”
Chang reports, “According to Focus Taiwan, Foxconn was building a $223 million “robot kingdom” in the Central Taiwan Science Park in the Taiwanese city of Taichung. The research and development center and manufacturing hub is part of Gou’s ambitious plan to build one million industrial robots.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
It’s only a matter of time until robotics technology is advanced enough to negate low labor costs and thus making Made In The USA viable once more. Assuming we get competitive with corporate tax rates.
Only in China would “zero Suicides” be a goal for a company. lol.
well maybe Microsoft..
I had the exact same thought.
It’s a goal for our militaries, so I wouldn’t be too dismissive.
There are suicides all across the world, FTB. It isn’t a laughing matter. It happens in the U.S. quite frequently and it isn’t a bluecollar-only issue. I have heard of two suicides within the past month and it has had a tremendous impact on their families and coworkers.
be careful using the word “jump” when describing their goals
@FTB
ballmer needs to suicide hopefully soon
No! Balmer needs to stay. We like his strategy we like it a lot 🙂
Apple is large enough and profitable enough to continue to make roads into “chip” design and manufacturing.
Ultra large scale integrated circuits with associated robotic assembly might eventually reduce the numbers of discrete components and allow robots to do most assembly for iPads.
That would be incredible. But it would not necessarily do what some people think in getting lots of manufacturing jobs back to the US.
It would get very high tech mechanical engineering, tooling, maintenance and operations employees in an automated factory and those will be great jobs at high salaries.
The days of the janitor making the proverbial $50/hr because he is in a union at GM are gone.
More robots. No layoffs. Zero suicides. Isnt that pretty much *everyone’s* plan?
The robots *will* displace manufacturing labor – it is inevitable. And that will eventually create a huge labor crisis for China.