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”
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?”
This story is from the May 16, 2017 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.
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This story is from the May 16, 2017 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.
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