First Financial Daily  was informed by Foxconn's external recruitment announcement that Foxconn has set up an automated robot product department (AR), located in Foxconn Hongguan Science and Technology Park, Bao'an District, Shenzhen, and is affiliated to Foxconn Technology Group SHZBG Hongchao product group.

This product is mainly dedicated to the design and manufacture of key components such as controllers, reducers, servo motors, and sensors necessary for the production of robots. It develops and manufactures various types of robots and expands its application to precision machining and LCD production.

       The company plans to introduce robotic workstations at production sites such as welding, assembly, handling, painting, and inspection.

       The trend of using industrial robots to replace manpower in China's manufacturing industry has already begun, and it is reminiscent of the "fight between workers and machines" discussed by Marx in Capital. Will Foxconn introduce 1 million industrial robots in three years, will it exclude labor, and put pressure on employment, especially the employment of new generation of migrant workers? Experts believe that there is no need to worry too much.

     50% of the process available robots, short-term unrealistic

       On July 29, Guo Taiming, the chairman of Foxconn Technology Group, told the media when attending the staff evening in Shenzhen. At present, Foxconn has 10,000 robots, which will reach 300,000 units next year. After three years, the scale of robots will reach 1 million. In the future, Foxconn will increase the number of robots on the production line to complete simple and repetitive work and replace workers.

Foxconn is China's largest electronics foundry and one of the world's largest electronics foundries. According to Guo Taiming, Foxconn's total number of employees is now close to 1.2 million, including more than 1 million employees in mainland China and over 400 thousand in Shenzhen alone.

First Financial Daily was informed by Foxconn's external recruitment announcement that Foxconn has set up an automated robot product department (AR), located in Foxconn Hongguan Science and Technology Park, Bao'an District, Shenzhen, and is affiliated to Foxconn Technology Group SHZBG Hongchao product group.

       This product is mainly dedicated to the design and manufacture of key components such as controllers, reducers, servo motors, and sensors necessary for the production of robots. It develops and manufactures various types of robots and expands its application to precision machining and LCD production.

       The company plans to introduce robotic workstations at production sites such as welding, assembly, handling, painting, and inspection.

       According to public information, Foxconn has been recruiting robot application engineers all over the country in the past two years to maintain the normal operation of robots on the production line. The Foxconn Jincheng Industrial Park Automation Robot Division and related schools have also established a "robot" training production workshop to train robot application engineers.

    All indications prove that Foxconn has put into practice the transformation strategy of expanding the use of robots.

       However, in the production process of electronic products, industrial robots can only replace manpower in some aspects.

       "It is unrealistic to use robots such as mobile phones with high-definition products." A manufacturing executive who has been away from Foxconn for less than a year told the newspaper yesterday that the main application field of robots in Foxconn's main mobile phone OEM business is still in the high-precision patch on the front end and the assembly and handling of the back end, it is necessary to use labor in most intermediate manufacturing steps.

       Machine vision manufacturer Cognex said that in theory, 50% of the current mainland electronics manufacturing process can be replaced by robots, but in fact, the large-scale investment of robots takes five years to recover costs, and involves Changes to the production line process. Therefore, even for mature electronics manufacturers, replacing robots with robots is a gradual process.

       Expert: short-term impact is limited, long-term advantage

       Experts in the labor market believe that industrial robots do not have a cost advantage over the mainstream of China's labor force. The substitution phenomenon mainly occurs in local jobs, and in general it is conducive to improving labor productivity and ultimately help to expand employment.

       Zhang Libin, director of the Labor Market Research Office of the Labor Science Research Institute of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, pointed out to the reporter that the impact of the use of robots like Foxconn on China's labor market is complex and comprehensive. In the short run, it may not form a prominent substitution effect, but it is positive in the long run.

       “First of all, it does have an alternative effect on some of the labor force, but we have to look at which part of the labor force it replaces, it may be a simple labor force, and it is the part of the current supply shortage, so it will not cause much Unemployment, on the other hand, can solve the problem of insufficient local labor supply. Secondly, in the long run, machine replacement is conducive to improving labor productivity, making the value created by unit labor higher, which is conducive to the improvement of economic level, and ultimately will benefit The expansion of employment."

       Huang Renmin, director of the Department of Public Administration of the China Institute of Labor Relations and director of the Labor Market Research Institute, said in an interview with this newspaper that the so-called replacement of workers with robots is not realistic at the current stage of China.

       “Machine replacement are a big trend, but it is a slow, gradual process." Huang Renmin said that in developed countries such as Europe and the United States, only individual jobs are replaced by machines, and they are not popular because machines are too expensive. The profit margins of Chinese foundry companies are particularly small, and it is actually difficult to use industrial robots on a large scale.

       As for how to deal with the possible local shocks in the short term, Zhang Libin believes that the key is to increase human capital investment, so that the replaced workers can quickly turn to new positions, such as improving skills, finding an operation, and maintaining robots, or enter some new departments that are created by the introduction of robots."