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What country will lead in physical automation for the country that master's it will remove the most labor costs. Also, who will be the leader in creating the automation to build physical objects? All this is being done all over the world, but some countries and companies must be the leaders in a few or several areas. Where there ever be a fully automated plant with automated management? How far and fast can the automation trend in everything take hold. What companies will dominate robotics and what companies will dominate automating professional jobs. Could we have a fully automated factory from the floor to the offices? Any thoughts or comments on this appreciated including predicting timelines.
South Korea is leading the world in Robot density, followed by Singapore and China. China is increasing it's robot density the fastest and doubled it's robot density in the last 4 years. Singapore is a bit of an outlier since it's manufacturing industry is relatively small.
Robot adoption in factories around the world continues at high speed: The new global average robot density reaches a record 162 units per 10,000 employees in 2023 - more than double the number measured only seven years ago (74 units). This is according to the World Robotics 2024 report...
ifr.org
You can't count out Japan, Germany, or the US. The US is still the most innovative country in the world.
How expensive you want your factory to be? You can approach near 100% automation like in modern wafer fabs, if you can afford $20M material handling systems. In comparison to how much factories cost for anything manufactured in lower volume than that of semiconductors, it's huge. An average PCBA + injection molding + assembly plant is just a concrete box with a few SMT lines, molding line, and 100 workers.
EVs are a great example. Tesla is the best in automation, but Chinese low-cost cars (with their supply chain advantages, rapid iteration, and extremely low profit margins) have already eroded Tesla's lead.
China is no longer a low labor cost country, believe it or not. Yes it's still much cheaper than USA, but more expensive than Mexico, India, Southeast Asia, and much of South America. China is competing with these countries for manufacturing as well. By global standards China is an upper-middle income country.
It's also wrong to say automation replaces labor, I think it's more accurate to say that automation increases labor productivity.
Automation can increase safety, reliability, quality, throughput for the same amount of labor. Every country has an incentive to increase productivity, low cost labor or not.
Automation is advancing and going down in price and will really increase efficiency as the cost of AI/ML to handle it comes down like all technologies come down in price as the advances are made and mass production of automation tools and software starts to dramatically lower costs by operating 24/7 with no heat, light or wasted space. Automation is advancing at the same accelerating rate as everything else. The world is accelerating and will only pick up speed, when was the last time tech went backwards?
