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Robots now assist in assembling iPhones, iPads
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 04 August 2011, 00:23 IST
Bangalore: Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group, recognized for assembling Apple's iPhone and iPads in China, is planning to replace workers with robots within next three years. It's the world's largest electronic component maker including printed circuit boards and manufactures many consumer electronic gadgets at its factories in China.
The company is afflicted of worker's suicide in the factories, since last year. According to Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, aim to use 1 million robots in order to improve the efficiency and rising labour cost by the year 2014. The rising labour cost drove the manufacturers to switch to automation.
At present, around 1,000 robots are being used, soon the number will increase to 30,000 next year and 1 million in coming three years.
C K Lu, a Taipei-based senior analyst with the research firm, Gartner, said, "Rising salary cost should be the key reason why Foxconn is doing this. This year's wage increase has been quite significant and I don't expect the pace to slow downnext year." He added, "If they don't do this, they will have to move their factories elsewhere."
China has been dealing with lots of labour-related issues off late like high profile strikes and many suicide cases at well known companies.
Foxconn employs around 1.2 million worker, 1 million are based in mainland China, revealed the China Business News. The death of a worker in Faxconn manufacturing plant is the latest in the latest in the suicides by workers.
Faxconn counts Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and Sony Erricson as its clients other than Apple.
