Posted on Monday, August 01 2011 @ 15:59 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Foxconn announced it plans to combat rising labor cost by replacing human labor with robots. The company currently has about 10,000 production robots but over the next three years the number of "Foxbots" is expected to soar to 1 million. It's unknown what this means for Foxconn's +1 million human employees. Market watchers believe labor demand from Foxconn will gradually turn from basic labor productivity to jobs with mid-range to high-end technology backgrounds and R&D talent.
In the next three years, Foxconn is aiming to add one million production robots to its production lines to replace human labor for works that are simple and have high repeatability. After the new setup is completed, it is expected to significantly boost Foxconn's production efficiency.
The company currently has about 10,000 production robots on the production lines with the volume to reach 300,000 units in 2012.
The production robots are named Foxbot and mainly handle work such as soldering and spray painting.
Source: DigiTimes
