China's Robot Revolution
Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East|May 16, 2017

Responding to an aging populace and rising wages, Beijing is pushing investment in automatons

“It’s simple, we will make robots until there’s no more people in factories”

Dexter Roberts and Rachel Chang, with Thomas Black
China's Robot Revolution

Inside a lab at Beijing-based e-commerce giant JD.com Inc., a spider like robot plunges from its grey frame, seizes a book on a conveyor belt with its suctioning claws, and throws it into a crate. The machine, developed for use in automated warehouses, can sort 3,600 objects an hour—four times as many as a human can. Almost 1,200 miles away, in a break room at E-Deodar Robot Equipment Co.’s factory in south China’s Pearl River Delta manufacturing hub, a human looking droid is deftly handling a more mundane task: serving workers coffee. Both are key to the mainland’s hopes to rule the market for service robots that can handle tasks such as delivering mail or making breakfast for a pensioner.

“They’re putting a lot of money and a lot of effort into automation and robotics,” says John Roemisch, vice president for regional operations at Fanuc America Corp., a unit of Japan’s Fanuc Corp., the world’s No. 1 robot maker. “There’s nothing keeping them from coming after our market.”

China is embracing robotics with the same fervour that made it a world leader in solar energy and high-speed rail—its more than 22,000 kilometres (13,670 miles) of installed track totals far more than any other nation’s. Beijing’s economic planners view it as a way to a broader strategic goal: dominating emerging markets for artificial intelligence, driverless vehicles, and digitally connected appliances and homes. “China has a great history of being an effective fast follower,” says Colin Angle, chief executive officer of US-based vacuum and defence robot maker IRobot Corp. “The question will be, can they innovate?”

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