“Foxconn parent company Hon Hai is set to deploy an army of 10,000 assembly-line robots to help meet the demands of producing the highly anticipated iPhone 6,” Reilly Dowd reports for The Fiscal Times. “Hon Hai CEO Terry Gou revealed in a recent shareholder meeting that Apple would be the very first customer of Foxconn’s latest robots.”
“‘Robots are going to enhance and speed up the manufacturing process,’ said Tim Bajarin, CEO of market research firm Creative Strategies. ‘The really big issue here is that the demand for the iPhone continues to grow. It’s grown every quarter since it came out,'” Dowd reports. “From a business standpoint, it makes sense. ‘When you are dealing with creating millions of smart phones per month, efficiency is critical,’ said Bajarin in an interview. ‘Robotics gives you that level of efficiency, which in the end, is very important for the bottom line.'”
“Throughout its various factories in China, Foxconn employs more than 1.2 million workers. They have reportedly hired an additional 100,000 workers in China — yes, human ones, to work alongside the robots,” Dowd reports. “‘I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the next five years, robots will even take care of the final touches,’ said Bajarin.”
“Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury secretary during the Clinton Administration and former head of Obama’s National Economic Council, predicts technology will have a profound effect on the average employee. “We are seeing less and less opportunity for what average people — people lacking in certain skills — are going to be able to do,” said Summers in May at the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism,” Dowd reports. “‘It is not true that innovation always makes more employment… There is nothing in the logic of the market or human experience to suggest that it must necessarily be so that there will be jobs for all at acceptable wages, no matter how technology evolves.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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