Roger Fingas
Apple's secondary manufacturer, Pegatron, is following in the footsteps of Foxconn and beginning to automate its factories — and cutting back on new hires as a result, according to the company's chairman.
With automation in place, Pegatron is recruiting fewer workers at its Shanghai factory, DigiTimes quoted T.H. Tung as saying in response to Chinese media reports. The facility should be able to use 20 people to do what previously took 100, Tung claimed.
It's not clear how many Pegatron production lines have been automated, but transition solves two problems for the company's management: the increasing difficulty of finding enough people to do menial assembly work, and the cost of hiring them, given improvements in wage standards.
Indirectly that change should benefit Apple, since cheaper labor costs at Pegatron may mean lower order quotes, and hence higher profits on Apple's end.
Foxconn is already making large strides in automation, for instance shrinking the workforce at its Kunshan factory from 110,000 people to only 50,000. Concerns have been raised about the socio-economic fallout of that sort of shift, given thousands of people being put out of work or forced to find it elsewhere. Kunshan has a large population of migrant workers, and if they leave in droves, that could impact not just them but the local economy for those who remain.
Pegatron is believed to be handling at least a portion of this fall's "iPhone 7" production, but only 4.7-inch models, not any 5.5-inch units.
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11 Comments
Oh, but all Apple manufacturing will be required to take place in the US, after the guy with the distinctive hair is in office.
Like Steve Jobs said, jobs are not coming back to USA... and jobs will not come back to China as well. Automations will do the majority of the work.
Que reactionary Mike Daisy article
I like the idea of automation because it shows that Apple's products are being condensed into components that can be produced via robots/automation. This cuts down on production errors (human errors mainly) and should give us a better product.
As for the reduction in workers, a cut of 50K is nothing for the Chinese workforce. The estimate on the workers used during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam was 250K. China's transient work force will find other work so I'm not that worried and I don't think China is either. This is also why people with bad hair don't understand why Apple can't bring production back to the US. We don't have 60K people (110K-50K) willing to work on one company's production line. We have more than that out of work but I don't see how any company or our government could bring that many people together to work on one project (except by creating another war, which seems to be the normal way to re-employ people).
The parts are getting too small for humans to assemble.