In China, industrial revolutions are sometimes trivialized. In its factory in the eastern port city of Qingdao, where some of the mansions are still reminiscent of the German colonizers of the early 20th century, the household appliance manufacturer Haier is showing what it says will soon be a fully automated factory: one click and the customer chooses pink as the color of his new washing machine. The name lettering is added, the family photo, then the device is completely personalized. A robot arm made of compartments grabs the ordered parts and assembles the washing machine – in 50 different variants.
It goes so fast that nobody can keep up. It takes the robot four minutes to test the water drainage and spin the finished device — six minutes faster than manual labor, which used to be done by three employees, Haier claims. Its washing machines not only get good test marks in Germany. They are also much cheaper than most competing products. So it’s no exaggeration when state television titles a three-hour live stream of the almost deserted production line in the factory in Qingdao with the words “Tide of Change”.
China has left many behind
In fact, the “Industrial Revolution 4.0”, which has been dubbed the replacement of man by machine in production, is changing no country as much as China. Last year, as many industrial robots were sold in China as in the rest of the world combined. But while it has long been known that China is quickly catching up with high-wage countries such as Germany and Japan when it comes to automating its economy, new data shows that the People’s Republic has already left many large Western economies behind.
According to a report published on Monday by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), there are already 322 robots for every 10,000 employees in China. In the USA, the largest economy in the world, there are significantly fewer with 274 robots.
Population researchers have been warning for many years that China can no longer rely on having its export goods manufactured by hundreds of millions of migrant workers on the factory lines in the future. For them, it is very likely that, contrary to official statistics, Chinese society is already shrinking. In the coming year, India will become the world’s most populous country, while China’s rapidly aging population threatens to run out of workers.
In their place, the robots should increase the low productivity, the growth of which has also been falling for years. In the factories of the leader South Korea there are still three times as many robots per 10,000 workers as in China. But the workbench of the world is already in fifth place in the automation ranking behind the dwarf state of Singapore, Japan and Germany.
The growth is real
The high number of robots from the People’s Republic therefore only seemed surprising at first glance, says Georg Stieler, who has been following the Chinese automation process as a management consultant for 10 years: “Apart from the lockdowns this year, China is an extremely strong manufacturing location.” Many Chinese companies have also ordered so many robots in the past 2 years because they did not know when they would be delivered as a result of a global shortage of semiconductors. According to some manufacturers, sales in China may decline slightly in the coming year. “But the figures from the four largest robot manufacturers in the world and also the data that we have from domestic manufacturers show: The growth is real and has continued into the third quarter of 2022.”
