Not even poor Chinese workers can compete against robots that don’t even need to be paid. At least, that’s what the founder of Foxconn thought a few years ago when he claimed the world’s biggest contract electronics maker would soon have an army of robots doing its work. The problem is, current technology still hasn’t reached the point where robots are better workers than humans.
Four years ago, Foxconn founder Terry Gou envisaged an army of one million robots would now be working the assembly lines at the world’s biggest contract electronics maker. Today the Taiwanese assembler of iPhones and iPads has around 50,000 automated employees and still has more than one million humans in its chain of Chinese factories. The deficit underscores the challenges Foxconn faces in fine tuning its robots–a catch-all term that includes robotic arms and other automated equipment–to handle the intricate tasks required to assemble modern gear and gadgets, according to Day Chia-Peng, general manager of the company’s automation technology development committee. Foxconn, which calls its industrial robots Foxbots, has been striving to accelerate manufacturing automation amid rising labor costs and workplace disputes, and to free humans of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. But high development costs and rapid changes in technology have slowed progress.