3/12/2019 Foxconn hits bumps in road to full automation | South China Morning Post

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Companies

Foxconn hits bumps in road to full

automation
Electronics assembler’s love affair with robots goes on
despite slowdown in the process of industrial automation
due to complex manufacturing operations
Topic |   Foxconn

He Huifeng  
Published: 10:00pm, 29 Jul, 2016

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3/12/2019 Foxconn hits bumps in road to full automation | South China Morning Post

Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest contract assembler of

electronics, said it is slowing the process of converting manual labour to full
automation because humans are cheaper and more exible to adapt to an ever-
shorter life cycle of consumer products.

The company had predicted installing one million robots [1] over a three-year
period in its China factories, according to a 2011 forecast by founder and
chairman Terry Gou.

Maxnerva pushes ‘smart factory’ projects in China with

contract manufacturing giant Foxconn
[2]

Instead, it installed about 40,000 fully operational industrial robots as well as

hundreds of thousands of other pieces of automated equipment, and still has
one million workers in more than 20 factories across the country putting
together Apple’s iPhones, iPads and smart devices for several other Chinese and
overseas brands.

“Highly automated manufacturing is still an ideal,” said Dai Chia-peng, the

general manager of Foxconn’s automation technology department committee,
during an interview last Wednesday with the South China Morning Post. “The
reality of manufacturing operations is more complex.”

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3/12/2019 Foxconn hits bumps in road to full automation | South China Morning Post

Dai said the pace of applying robots in Foxconn’s factories had slowed in the
past year, following current technical limitations in automation and concerns
over cost-e ective manufacturing management.

The robots set to disrupt white collar work

[3]

Global sales and installation of industrial robots rose 12 per cent last year,
slowing from the previous year’s 29 per cent pace, as a slowdown in China’s
economic growth and changing appetites for electronic gadgets among Chinese
consumers forced factories to postpone automation.

“The life cycle of consumer products like smartphones has become shorter and
shorter, so it’s not cost-e ective to spend money on a fully automated
production line,” Dai said. “Humans are more exible and cost-e ective at a
big number of workstations.”

Foxconn is also taking advantage of the lull in buying robots to develop its own
automatons with an eye to selling these equipment to other manufacturers.

Known as Foxbots, these automatons were capable of performing more than 20

types of manufacturing tasks common among industrial factories, including
pressing, printing, polishing and quality testing, said Dai.

The company also plans to sell Foxbots, using its own experience in contract
manufacturing to provide automation solutions for other factories.

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3/12/2019 Foxconn hits bumps in road to full automation | South China Morning Post

It now has the capacity to churn out more than 10,000 Foxbots a year,
employing more than 1,200 workers in Taipei, Shenzhen and Jincheng in Shanxi
province.

“We can help clients realign their entire production line based on Foxconn’s
understanding and experience in automation,” Dai said.

Foxconn had already automated up to 70 per cent of its mechanical processes,

he said.

Some “lights out” – or fully automated – factories had been established in

Zhengzhou, Kunshan and Shenzhen.

The company was also redeploying some of the robots that had already been
installed, Dai said.

“We learned through trial and error how to optimise our automation solutions
and redeploy our stock robots to complete new tasks,” he said.

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3/12/2019 Foxconn hits bumps in road to full automation | South China Morning Post

On the assembly line, where gadgets are put together by hand, machines are
only able to handle about 5 per cent of the tasks because machines are still
unable to replace the hand-eye coordination of human workers.

“We would need a breakthrough in innovation if we were to be able to replace

workers with automation,” Dai said.

To be sure, with 40,000 robots bought and installed, Foxconn still counts as one
of the biggest customers of industrial automation in China.

Last month, the Robotic Industries Association awarded its Engelberger

Robotics Award to Dai, citing the company’s role in pushing China to become
the world’s largest and fastest-growing market for automatons.

“Compared with those domestic companies investing aggressively in the

industry for governments’ vast incentives, Foxconn’s automation target is
pragmatic for its real manufacturing demand,” said Wang Cairong, the
executive director at the China Arti cial Intelligence Robot Industry Alliance.

Source URL: https://scmp.com/business/companies/article/1996639/foxconn-

hits-bumps-road-full-automation

Links

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3/12/2019 Foxconn hits bumps in road to full automation | South China Morning Post

[1] https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1996643/chinese-
robot-makers-upbeat-sales
[2] https://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/1984880/maxnerva-
pushes-smart-factory-projects-china-contract-manufacturing
[3] https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/1986871/robots-set-
disrupt-white-collar-work

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: The road to full
automation

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