Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Li Xuena, Wang Xinci and Zhang Boling — China’s factories are building a robot nation

The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which represents robot manufacturers and research institutes, said China last year surpassed Japan to become the world’s biggest market for industrial robots. Some 200,000 were operating in China at the end of 2014, the IFR said, with 32,000 installed in 2013 alone, accounting for 20% of worldwide installations that year. 
The robot-to-worker ratio in the country is still relatively low, the IFR said, with 30 robots working in manufacturing plants per 10,000 employees. Japan’s ratio is 11 times higher. 
Four multinational companies — Switzerland’s ABB Group ABBN, +0.64% , Japan’s Fanuc Corp. 6954, +2.78% FANUF, -2.14% and Yaskawa Electric Corp. 6506, -0.18% , and Germany’s Kuka Robotics KU2, +0.46% — are the dominant suppliers of robotic systems for factories in China. Mir Industry, a Chinese industrial consultancy, said the four account for about 58% of the nationwide market...
MarketWatch
China’s factories are building a robot nation
Li Xuena, Wang Xinci and Zhang Boling

Also

NewsWeek
Rise of Robot Factories Leading 'Fourth Industrial Revolution'
Rose Jacobs

2 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Right so ABB sells the robots to China and then China uses the robots to undercut ABB in the US market so ABB has to meet these Chinese price reductions in USD terms or lose share in US...

so they cut prices for ABB components in the US in USD terms to meet the Chinese on price and the CHF goes down vs USD when ABBs banks (UBS? CS?) have to buy USDs with CHF to deal with this price reduction in the ABB product inventories they are financing in the US subsidiary of UBS....

"race to the bottom"...

Tom Hickey said...

Capitalism, which is what intellectual property is designed to avoid by creating artificial scarcity to give owners of intellectual property monopoly power for a period of time.

Everyone is for free markets, except when they are not.