It is reported that at present, these robotic workers have been put into use at the computer/peripheral plants in Zhengzhou factory, Chengdu tablet factory, Kunshan and Jiashan. It has even been revealed that Foxconn's "machine substitution" program is accelerating and that tens of thousands of robots will be put into use every year. However, it is unclear whether they have participated in the manufacture of Apple devices.
The Foxconn machine substitution plan has several reasons. On the one hand, under the pressure of labor shortage and rising labor costs, Foxconn hopes to use robots to make up for job vacancies and get rid of dependence on unsustainable cheap labor. In addition, Apple has stronger The bargaining power, while Foxconn has to ensure its own profits, so Foxconn began to force the field of industrial robots is also forced by the situation.
Foxconn Goes on Robots, Trying to Replace Cheap Labor
We know that the advantage of industrial robots is that of efficiency compared to traditional manpower. From the perspective of the cost of mature welding workers, industrial robots will be depreciated for 10 years of service life (including maintenance costs). Under the same benefits, the cost of industrial robots will be lower than the labor cost.
However, the key to the current problem is that the limitations of robots are too obvious. On the one hand, there are very limited costs and technological breakthroughs. That is, robots are currently only capable of performing streamlined operations on simple machines. A Taiwanese middle class of Foxconn once said that robots can only be used for front-end work on the production line. The core of Foxconn is the assembly of the back-end, and robots can actually substitute less than 50% of the processes.