Construction
is underway for an “all robot” electronics factory in Dongguan, southern China.
The South China Morning Post reports that 1.000 robots would be deployed initially at the Shenzhen Evenwin Precision Technology Co. factory, in the Pearl River Delta
manufacturing hub region.
Chairman
Chen Qixing said it planned to run its electronics components factory with only 200 people (it
currently employs about 1,800).
Chen and owns 38 per cent of the business recently became a paper billionaire (in US dollar terms) reported Bloomberg in March.
According
to the Dongguan Economy and Information Technology Bureau,
the 505 factories in the area have invested 4.2 billion yuan (about $0.85
billion AUD) in robots since September.
There have been many stories
written recently about China’s heavy investment in factory robots due to labour shortages and rising
manufacturing wages, which have “more than quintupled in the last decade”
according to a New York Times report last month.
According to the International Federation of Robotics’ preliminary report for 2014, China was
the leading purchaser of industrial robots.
The country purchased
approximately 56,000 units (an increase of 54 per cent on 2013) of a global
total of approximately 225,000.
Image: http://www.scmp.com/