A little over two years ago Terry Gou the CEO of Foxconn announced that over the next three years his company was going to begin phasing in up to 3 million industrial robots with an eye towards increasing efficiency and reducing labor costs. This announcement, from the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, sent waves through the media and business community. Foxconn employs over 1.5 million people in China, in hundreds of plants and facilities, scattered around the country.

The prospect of Foxconn shifting towards robotic labor has enormous implications for the future of not just the Chinese, but also global labor markets. This is primarily because of the type of work that the robots engage in is the assembly of complex electronics, an area previously thought beyond the capabilities of commercial robotics and left presumably to human hands. So far, the robots seem more than up to the job.

While the headline grabbing prediction of ‘millions of robots’ does not seem to have panned out in the time frame that Gou predicted, Foxconn has nevertheless managed to deploy significant numbers of its new robotic workers. Over the course of last year, Foxconn managed to install 30,000-50,000 new robots in its factories, and […]