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Business/Finance See other Business/Finance Articles Title: Industrial automation picks up pace in China Want... Production lines at the factories of Midea Group, a leading manufacturer of home appliances in China, appear to be quite empty, with only a handful of human workers. this comes as a result of the integration of high-level automation as a great deal of assembly jobs are now going to robots, leaving only the final checks and testing to humans. Even the checking and testing work will be taken over by robots, said Wu Shobao, vice general manager of the household air-conditioner department of the company, according to Caixin.com. The production lines embody the group's efforts to improve their industrial automation in recent years, as a result of which the number of workers at its production base in Shunde in the Guangdong city of Foshan has dropped to 800 and that at its production base in Handan, Hebei province to 2,800, down from 2,800 and 3,800, respectively. Midea's air-conditioner department aims to slash its workforce to 26,000 by the end of this year, down from 30,000 now, and to 20,000 in 2018, thanks to the installation of new robots. Electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn pioneered industrial automation in China with the establishment of an automation and robot department in 2007. By 2009, the company had developed 15 robots in six series, dubbed the "Foxbot," which have been widely installed at Foxconn's production lines for such tasks as materials feeding, painting and coating, polishing, and film pasting. Subsequently, the automation trend has been penetrating growing numbers of sectors in the country, including porcelain, bathroom and kitchen ware and hardware in the Pearl River Delta, as well as various lines in the Yangtze River Delta. When carrying out a study in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces for a plan to invest in the robotics industry, a private equity fund manager was surprised by the huge demand and the extent of applications for robots among electronics manufacturers in the region. The demand has been prompted by the difficulty in recruiting laborers for work involving higher levels of pollution and monotony, the manager said. MIR, an industry consulting firm, predicts that China's industrial robot market will expand at an annual clip of over 25% in the next two to three years, especially in the fields of auto and electronics manufacturing as well as the production of food and beverages. Poster Comment: Not much point in bringing jobs back to America if... Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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