2024-02-13 08:32:18
An ABB collaborative robot packages products, at a stand at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai, November 6, 2023. SHENG JIEPENG / CHINA NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMAGES
The place is as much a workshop as a factory: lots of shelves, a few testing stations, three assembly lines of around ten meters each. On large metal chests of drawers, white and green robotic arms grab screws and bolts and adjust them to pieces. Welcome to CGXI, a start-up with 300 employees located in Wuxi, north of Shanghai, which manufactures “cobots” (contraction of “robot” and “collaborative”), namely small industrial robots capable of working collaboratively. with humans.
Here, robots make robots. Paradoxically, the company has not yet achieved a high degree of automation, due to its small production volumes. But, thanks to financing from a public investment bank, the young company is preparing to launch a new fully automated factory, whose “3.0” industrial process will be optimized for larger-scale production.
Because the market is enormous: in 2022, China will have deployed 290,000 industrial robots, or more than half of the installations in the world, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). According to the China Institute of Electronics, the market is expected to reach 11.5 billion dollars (around 10.7 billion euros) in 2024.
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Rapid factory automation reflects a major transition. Indeed, with a working age population in decline since 2010 and wages on the rise, the Middle Kingdom no longer attracts multinationals in search of cheap labor as easily. To remain the world’s factory, it must move upmarket.
The authorities understood this well. Thus, there are dozens of support plans, both at central and local levels. As early as 2015, Guangdong, a large industrial province in the South-East, was equipped with a plan to “replace humans with robots”, endowed with 950 billion yuan (123 billion euros). And this voluntarism has not weakened. At the beginning of 2023, the central government published a “Robot+ action plan” aimed at developing the automation of most economic sectors, from industry to agriculture, including health.
With 322 robots per 10,000 workers, China ranks fifth in the world among the best equipped countries, behind South Korea (1,000 per 10,000), Singapore, Japan and Germany, but ahead of the United States. United States (272 per 10,000) and France. This equipment rate is all the more surprising given that labor costs remain much lower in China.
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