Apple supplier Foxconn so far up to 40,000 'Foxbots' in China

Apple's main assembly partner, Foxconn, has so far installed 40,000 production robots across China as it looks to minimize the number of people it employs, reports noted on Wednesday.

With the exception of some components like servo motors and speed reducers, the robots are being built entirely in-house, Foxconn's Dai Chia-peng told Taiwan's Central News Agency, as quoted by DigiTimes. It's unclear how many of the so-called "Foxbots" are being used to manufacture Apple products.

The machines are, however, said to be operating an industrial facility in Zhengzhou, a tablet plant in Chengdu, and computer/peripherals plants in Kunshan and Jiashan.

Dai commented that Foxconn is currently manufacturing 10,000 robots per year. Each one can potentially go far towards replacing human labor — in Kunshan alone, Foxconn is known to have cut 60,000 workers.

Until recently it was often cheaper for Chinese companies to pay thousands or millions of people low wages rather than use robots. Rising labor standards and a lack of interest from young workers, however, has led some firms to make the high upfront investment in automation.

19 Comments

sockrolid 2789 comments · 14 Years

About 8 years ago

Step 1: Install robots in Foxconn factories
Step 2: Move the factories to the US

cali 3494 comments · 10 Years

If Foxconn installed robots I predicted Apple haters would say Apple products are putting poor Chinese people out of jobs. The same Apple haters who said Chinese workers were slaves.

randominternetperson 3094 comments · 8 Years

sockrolid said:

Step 1: Install robots in Foxconn factories
Step 2: Move the factories to the US

I believe Steve Jobs made the argument that the US doesn't have the thousands (or tens of thousands) of automation engineers (my phrase) required to do manufacturing at this scale. I expect the same story would apply here; we don't have the thousands of people who could maintain an army of robots. So, no I don't expect those Foxconn factories to be coming here.

sockrolid said:

Step 1: Install robots in Foxconn factories
Step 2: Move the factories to the US

Here's the quote from Jobs:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/17/technology/apple-china-jobs/index.html
Steve Jobs, Apple's late CEO, brought the issue up during an October 2010 meeting with President Obama. He called America's lackluster education system an obstacle for Apple, which needed 30,000 industrial engineers to support its on-site factory workers.
"You can't find that many in America to hire," Jobs told the president, according to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. "If you could educate these engineers, we could move more manufacturing plants here."

anantksundaram 20389 comments · 18 Years

Fairly predictable outcome, given the overwrought reactions and hectoring, and all-around bad press from some employees committing suicide (I know, I know, even one suicide is a terrible thing; I am merely raising the empirical fact that suicide rates at Foxconn were less than in the Chinese population as a whole). The company had to put up with all manner of the Daiseys and the New York Times's of the world, as well as pesky NGOs showing up in droves with questionnaires to "audit" Foxconn's practices on behalf of the oh-so-moral-and-ethical corporations back home.

Guess what comes home to roost? Robots and unemployment.

/headshake