日志
Revolution of Industrial Robert in China, advantages or disadvantages
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The Ying Ao sink foundry in southern China’s Guangdong province does not look like a factory of the future. The sign over the entrance is faded; inside, the floor is greasy with patches of mud, and a thick metal dust — the by-product of the stainless-steel polishing process — clogs the air. As workers haul trolleys across the factory floor, the cavernous, shed-like building reverberates with a loud clanging.
Guangdong is the growth engine of China’s manufacturing industry, generating $615bn in exports last year — more than a quarter of the country’s total. In this part of the province, the standard wage for workers is about Rmb4,000 ($600) per month. Ying Ao, which manufactures sinks destined for the kitchens of Europe and the US, has to pay double that, according to deputy manager Chen Conghan, because conditions in the factory are so unpleasant. So, four years ago, the company started buying machines to replace the ever more costly humans.
Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers. Robotic arms pick up sinks from a pile, buff them until they gleam and then deposit them on a self-driving trolley that takes them to a computer-linked camera for a final quality check.
The company, which exports 1,500 sinks a day, spent more than $3m on the robots. “These machines are cheaper, more precise and more reliable than people,” says Chen. “I’ve never had a whole batch ruined by robots. I look forward to replacing more humans in future,” he adds, with a wry smile.
Across the manufacturing belt that hugs China’s southern coastline, thousands of factories like Chen’s are turning to automation in a government-backed, robot-driven industrial revolution the likes of which the world has never seen. Since 2013, China has bought more industrial robots each year than any other country, including high-tech manufacturing giants such as Germany, Japan and South Korea. By the end of this year, China will overtake Japan to be the world’s biggest operator of industrial robots, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), an industry lobby group. The pace of disruption in China is “unique in the history of robots,” says Gudrun Litzenberger, general secretary of the IFR, which is based in Germany, home to some of the world’s leading industrial-robot makers.
China’s technological transformation still has far to go — the country has just 36 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, compared with 292 in Germany, 314 in Japan and 478 in South Korea. But it is already changing the face of the global manufacturing industry. In the process, it is raising broader questions: can emerging economies still hope to follow the traditional route to prosperity that the developed world has relied upon since Britain’s industrial revolution in the 18th century? Or will robots assume many of the jobs that once pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty?
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China’s spending splurge on industrial robots has its roots in a pressing economic problem. From the 1980s onwards, as Beijing’s Communist rulers opened up to global trade, the country’s huge, cheap workforce helped make it the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods. Breakneck economic growth lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty and transformed swaths of the country, as workers migrated from the countryside to the city. But a growing middle class and an ageing population have led to rising wages, eroding China’s competitive advantage. Partly because of the one-child policy, formally phased out in 2015, China’s working-age population is expected to fall from one billion people last year to 960 million in 2030, and 800 million by 2050.
In recent years, China’s central planners have been promoting automation as a way to fill the labour gap. They have promised generous subsidies — to be doled out by local governments — to smooth the way for Chinese companies both to use and build robots. In 2014, President Xi Jinping called for a “robot revolution” that would transform first China, and then the world. “Our country will be the biggest market for robots,” he said in a speech to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, “but can our technology and manufacturing capacity cope with the competition? Not only do we need to upgrade our robots, we also need to capture markets in many places.”
The march of the machines, not just in China but around the world, has been accelerated by sharp falls in the price of industrial robots and a steady increase in their capabilities. Boston Consulting Group, a management consultancy, predicts that the price of industrial robots and their enabling software will drop by 20 per cent over the next decade, while their performance will improve by 5 per cent each year.
Liu Hui, an entrepreneur in his forties, is making the most of China’s robot boom. In 2001, when he opened his first factory in Foshan, an industrial city of seven million people in Guangdong, he started out making knock-offs of electric fans. As his business grew, he moved to bona fide manufacturing, producing components for Chinese home appliance brands. Then, in 2012, spotting an opportunity in a growing market, he jumped into the emerging world of robotics. Liu now imports robotic arms from suppliers such as the Swedish-Swiss conglomerate ABB, and sells them on to Chinese manufacturers, helping them integrate the machines into their production lines. It is a highly specialised business. Most of his customers are component-makers who supply motors and other parts to large Chinese home-appliance brands such as Midea and Galanz, which produce air conditioners, refrigerators and more.
Business has expanded so quickly in the past year that Liu does not have enough space in his factory for all the machinery he is assembling. He has to store parts designed to support a $23,000 ABB robot under a makeshift lean-to outside. “Things are changing rapidly,” he says. “The cost of labour is rising every year, and young people don’t want to work on the production line like their parents did, so we need machines to replace them.”
The stereotypical image of China’s factories can still be found in many places: tens of thousands of people in long lines hunched over sewing machines or slotting components into a printed circuit board. But that mode of manufacturing is starting to be replaced by a more mixed picture: partially automated production lines, with human workers interspersed at a few key points.
Meanwhile, China is developing its own robot makers. In September last year, Ningbo Techmation, a Shanghai-listed producer of machinery for the plastics industry, launched a subsidiary, E-Deodar, making robots that are 20-30 per cent cheaper than those produced by international companies such as ABB, Germany’s Kuka or Japan’s Kawasaki. The E-Deodar factory in Foshan, with its café, chill-out zone and open-plan production line, looks more like the offices of a Silicon Valley tech start-up than a Chinese industrial workhorse. “Our global rivals are very good at making robots but their costs are higher and they are not so good at understanding the needs of local customers,” says Zhang Honglei, the company’s 35-year-old, spiky-haired technical director.
The cost of labour is rising and young people don’t want to work on the production line like their parents did
- Liu Hui, Chinese entrepreneur
This year, Zhang plans to produce 350 distinctively green-coloured robots, which are designed for use in plastic factories and sell for between $14,000 and $18,000 each; in three years’ time he hopes to produce 3,000 a year. “We have to move fast because automation is a scale business,” he says. “The bigger the better.”
Chinese manufacturers, which bought 66,000 of the 240,000 industrial robots sold globally last year, still largely prefer to buy international brands, according to Litzenberger of the IFR. But she expects that to change, particularly in the wake of the Beijing government throwing its full support behind the domestic robot industry in recent years. “They are developing very fast,” she says.
At an imposing, colonnade-fronted government building — known locally as the “White House” — in the Shunde district of Foshan, officials are trying to put President Xi’s call for a robot revolution into practice. The province of Guangdong has vowed to invest $8bn between 2015 and 2017 on automation. Zhang Peng, vice-director of Shunde’s economy and technology bureau, recently had his office in the building reduced in size, in line with the Communist party’s call for bureaucratic austerity. But the budget for industrial automation was unaffected. Zhang says robots are vital to overcome labour shortages and help Chinese companies make better quality, more competitive products. Unusually straight-talking for a Chinese official, he warns: “If manufacturing companies don’t improve, they won’t be able to survive.”
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Government support for the integration of ever cheaper and more efficient industrial robots is good news for factory owners in China, who are facing a weak global economy and a slowdown in domestic demand. But the benefits of the robot revolution will not be shared equally across the world. Developing countries from India to Indonesia and Egypt to Ethiopia have long hoped to follow the example of China, as well as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan before them: stimulating job creation and economic growth by moving agricultural workers into low-cost factories to make goods for export. Yet the rise of automation means that industrialisation is likely to generate significantly fewer jobs for the next generation of emerging economies. “Today’s low-income countries will not have the same possibility of achieving rapid growth by shifting workers from farms to higher-paying factory jobs,” researchers from the US investment bank Citi and the University of Oxford concluded in a recent report, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, on the impact of technological change.
They argue that China’s rising labour costs are a “silver lining” for the country because they are driving technological advancement, in much the same way that an increase in wages in 18th-century Britain provided impetus to the world’s first industrial revolution. At the same time, according to Johanna Chua, an economist at Citi in Hong Kong, industrial laggards in parts of Asia and Africa face a “race against the machines” as they struggle to create sufficient manufacturing jobs before they are wiped out by the gathering robot army in China and beyond.
Tom Lembong, Indonesia’s 45-year-old trade minister, and a leading voice for liberalisation and reform within the government of Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, is aware of the risks. “Many people don’t realise we’re seeing a quantum leap in robotics,” he says. “It’s a huge concern and we need to acknowledge the looming threat of this new industrial revolution. But as a political and business elite, we’re still stuck on debates about industrialisation that were settled in the 20th and even 19th centuries.”
Countries such as Indonesia are already suffering from something that the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has dubbed “premature de-industrialisation”. This describes a trend where emerging economies see their manufacturing sector begin to shrink long before the countries have reached income levels comparable to the developed world. Despite rapid economic growth over the past 15 years, Indonesia saw its manufacturing industry’s share of the economy peak in 2002. Analysts believe this is partly because of a failure to invest in infrastructure, and the country’s uncompetitive trade and investment policy, and partly due to globalisation.
Rodrik believes the country will never be able to grow at the kind of rapid rate experienced by China or South Korea. “Traditionally, manufacturing required very few skills and employed a lot of people,” he says. “Because of automation, the skills required have increased significantly and many fewer people are employed to run factories. What do you do with these extra workers? They won’t turn into IT entrepreneurs or entertainers; and, if they become restaurant workers, they will be paid much less than in a factory.”
The spread of robots makes it much harder for developing countries to get on the “escalator” of economic growth, he argues. That is bad news for the estimated two million young people who enter the workforce every year in Indonesia, a nation of 255 million, where 40 per cent live on $3 a day or less. Mahami Jaya Lumbanraja, a 22-year-old job-seeker on the Indonesian industrial island of Batam, is feeling the effects of the premature de-industrialisation phenomenon. For seven months he has been looking for a factory job in Batam, which sits just 20 miles from prosperous Singapore, but he has had no luck. Wearing faded jeans, a grey hoodie and an endearing smile, Lumbanraja says that although he has one year of experience working for Shimano, the Japanese manufacturer of bicycle gears and fishing tackle, he is not experienced enough to secure anything more than an entry-level position, and that there are many more job hunters than openings. “I can survive on the little money I get from busking and helping friends with construction work but I must get a proper factory job to save enough money so I can set up my own small shop later,” he says. Wages in Batam — around $230 per month — are double what Lumbanraja could earn in his home city of Medan, on the island of Sumatra. So he feels he must stay until he finds work.
Lumbanraja is one of about 700 Indonesians in their late teens and early twenties who visit the community centre at the Batamindo industrial park every day looking for work. In February, 3,000 people applied in person for just 80 positions at a Japanese-owned wiring factory there, a gathering so large that executives initially feared it was a labour protest.
Batamindo is a joint venture between Singaporean and Indonesian investors that was backed by Presidents Lee Kuan Yew and Suharto — the two nations’ respective rulers — when it opened in 1990. Intended as the showpiece of Indonesia’s industrialisation strategy, it has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with it. In recent times, an average of five factories a year have left the industrial park for other countries and the number of people employed there has dropped to just 46,000, from a peak of 80,000 in 2000. That is despite the fact that wages today are between one-third and one-half of the level paid in China’s Guangdong province.
Lembong, a Harvard graduate who ran his own Singapore-based private equity firm before he was appointed trade minister in August, says the government is determined to tackle the twin problems at the heart of Indonesia’s economic malaise: weak infrastructure and over-regulation.
But some argue that reform will come too late. During its period of rapid industrialisation, China invested in the modern highways, railways and ports necessary to support its manufacturing sector. In contrast, the physical infrastructure in Batam and much of Indonesia has “not changed much since the 1970s,” says Mook Sooi Wah, general manager of Batamindo.
Indonesia actually had a slightly higher “robot density” than China when the latest figures were collated by the International Federation of Robotics in 2014, although the situation is likely to have changed dramatically since then given the pace of Beijing’s automation push. This anomaly was largely the result of China’s manufacturing workforce being so much bigger than that of Indonesia, which still has no government plan or backing for industrial automation.
Many people don’t realise we’re seeing a quantum leap in robotics
- Tom Lembong, Indonesia’s trade minister
Indonesia’s regulatory process is as fusty as its infrastructure. Recently, legitimate shipments from a paper factory were held by customs at the Batam port because of a rule meant to stop the export of illegally sourced wood. These problems leave even Batam’s boosters exasperated.
Stefan Roll, a German manufacturing veteran who worked in China during its industrial take-off in the 1990s, enjoys living and working in Indonesia. But he worries that the country is missing its “golden opportunity” to become efficient enough to compete on a global scale. “When you are dealing with multinationals, time is money,” Roll says as he shows off his new factory in Batam, which assembles coffee machines for Nestlé. “But you can only do just-in-time manufacturing if you have good roads and infrastructure.”
While few doubt the depth of the challenges facing developing countries, not everyone sees the dilemma in such bleak terms. With wages in countries such as Indonesia and India much lower than in China and their populations still relatively young, some analysts believe they can attract more labour-intensive industries, such as garment-making, where widespread automation is not yet suitable.
“As China moves up the industrial chain, it’s actually freeing up a lot of opportunities for Southeast Asia and India,” says Anderson Chow, a robotics industry analyst at the investment bank HSBC, in Hong Kong.
Hal Sirkin, an expert on manufacturing at Boston Consulting Group, says that from the perspective of an economy such as India’s, it does not make sense to automate now because it would drive up the price of goods — “when they have one billion people who can make things cheaply”. He is among the tech optimists who believe that, in the medium term, automation will also create new business niches for emerging economies, mitigating the damage from the jobs that will be eradicated.
“We think you’re going to see more localisation rather than more scale,” says Sirkin. “I can put up a plant, change the software and manufacture all sorts of things, not in the hundreds of millions but runs of five million or 10 million units.”
But Carl Frey, an expert on employment and technology at the University of Oxford, warns that without better education and more skills, developing countries will struggle to take advantage of advancements in manufacturing.
“Technology is becoming increasingly skill-based,” he says. “Many of these countries don’t have a skilled workforce so they’re not very good at adopting these technologies.”
. . .
China itself is not immune from the negative consequences of automation. More than 40 per cent of its 1.4 billion population still live in the countryside, many in poverty, having benefited only marginally from the urban economic miracle.
But the government is betting that the benefits of promoting cutting-edge manufacturing will outweigh the damage from the potential jobs lost. The industrial strategy announced by Beijing last year — known as Made in China 2025 — is designed not only to improve the technological capability of its factories but also to support the development of Chinese brands internationally.
Chow, the HSBC analyst, says that as Chinese companies try to increase their exports to alleviate the impact of the domestic slowdown, they are likely to focus more on the quality of their products: “Quite often part of that development is a better production process, involving robotics.”
Every year, the amount of time it takes for a company’s investment in a robot to pay off — known as the “payback period” — is narrowing sharply, making it more attractive for small Chinese companies and workshops to invest in automation. The payback period for a welding robot in the Chinese automotive industry, for instance, dropped from 5.3 years to 1.7 years between 2010 and 2015, according to calculations by analysts at Citi. By 2017, the payback period is forecast to shrink to just 1.3 years.
Automation is not just about putting cheaper and more efficient robot arms on the production line. Li Gan, the general manager of Shangpin Home Collection, which makes and sells customised home furniture, says the greater opportunity is to integrate robots on the factory floor with real-time data from customers and automated logistics systems.
Thanks to the use of robots, the factory that Shangpin opened in Foshan in 2014 was 40 per cent more productive than its previous plant, even though it employs 20 per cent fewer people. Later this year, it will start up the machines at its newest and biggest production base, where it hopes to improve productivity fourfold with just double the number of staff, by using more robots to move supplies around the factory floor and help pack outbound shipping containers.
Drilling wooden slats for the company’s diverse range of beds, wardrobes and other bespoke furniture used to be a painstaking and sometimes dangerous process. Now a worker simply picks up each piece of wood, scans a barcode and puts the wood on a conveyor belt that takes it to the robot arm. The finished product returns on another belt. The process in between is strikingly complicated: Shangpin had to design a device to make sure that each slat would be aligned in the right way for it to be grasped by the robot arm, and the drilling specifications for the slats have to be pre-programmed and recorded in a barcode, because the robots do not yet have any artificial intelligence capability. Li Gan points out that human oversight and decision-making is still crucial. “Automation is just a technical process but what is more important is our thinking about how best to do this,” he says. “Every time we change something, we ask: is it more effective to do this using humans or robots?”
Every time we change something, we ask: is it more effective to do this using humans or robots?
- Li Gan, general manager of Shangpin Home Collection, Foshan
Boston Consulting Group forecasts that the percentage of tasks handled by advanced robots will rise from 8 per cent today to 26 per cent by the end of the decade, driven by China, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the US, which together will account for 80 per cent of robot purchases. Sirkin at BCG says that the rapid expansion of automation could be compared to the difference between the “human learning curve” and Moore’s Law, which posited that computing power could double every 18 months to two years. “Even if you’re very good, humans can only double their productivity at best every 10 years,” he says. In contrast, researchers can push robots to double their productivity every four years, he estimates. “Compounded over time, that makes a big difference.”
As China and other industrial leaders build more and better robots, the tasks they can take on will expand. Butchery, for example, was long considered the sort of skill that machines would struggle to develop, because of the need for careful hand-eye co-ordination and the manipulation of non-uniform slabs of meat. But Sirkin has watched robots cut the fat off meat much more efficiently than humans, thanks to the use of cheaper and more responsive sensors. “It’s becoming economically feasible to use machines to do this because you save another 3 or 4 per cent of the meat — and that’s worth a lot on a production line, where you can move quickly.
“There are things that humans can do better than robots,” he adds. “But they are getting less and less.”
Ben Bland is the FT’s South China correspondent and a former Indonesia correspondent
Photographs by Zeng Han and Muhammad Fadli
A brief guide to industrial robots
What is an industrial robot?
Many automated tasks in factories are performed by robotic arms programmed to complete repetitive and sometimes dangerous tasks.
A growing number of factories are also buying self-driving freight carriers and autonomous forklift trucks to reduce manpower.
Most industrial robots operate at a distance from their co-workers, sometimes in cages for safety reasons, but a new generation of humanoid robots is being developed to work alongside humans.
The $25,000 Baxter robot, for instance, which is designed to perform simple tasks such as packing and loading, has a screen with an animated face that frowns when there is a problem.
What can they do well?
Three-quarters of all industrial robots operate in four sectors: computers and electronic goods; home appliances and components; transportation equipment; and machinery. That’s partly because automation makes financial sense in these industries and partly because of the limited nature of the existing technology.
Industrial robots are usually fixed in a single location and are adept at performing uniform tasks with objects that are stationary or that move at a predictable speed.
Robots can work more quickly than humans, with a high degree of consistency and precision, and do not need breaks to sleep or eat, of course.
What can’t they do well?
Other than a few cutting-edge “intelligent” robots, most of these machines have to be pre-programmed for each specific task on the production line.
Precision can be a challenge too. Robots have no problem placing electronic components on to a flat circuit board, for instance, but struggle to assemble a car battery, which has many small parts that must be installed at odd angles.
Very labour-intensive tasks such as sewing garments and shoemaking have seen minimal automation so far. But that is starting to change, with Adidas opening a robot-dominated shoe factory in Germany this year.
Letter in response to this report
Labour and leisure strategies for the robot revolution / From Ira Sohn
本·布兰德：中国掀起全球机器人革命
发表时间：2016-05-27 07:45:06
未来，中国的工厂不会再像中国南方广东省的樱奥厨具那样了。这家工厂门口的招牌已经褪色，地上沾满了泥，积着一层厚厚的金属粉末。这些金属粉末是不锈钢抛光加工的副产物，它们时常飘在空气中。工人们推着手推车在工厂里往返奔波，机器的轰鸣声似乎要把整座工厂震塌了。
英国《金融时报》4月28日文章：中国的机器人革命
位于华南的广东省是中国制造业增长的引擎。去年，广东省的出口额达到6150亿美元，占中国全年出口总额的四分之一有余。广东产业工人的月平均工资是4000元人民币，约合600美元，而向欧美出口厨房水槽的樱奥厨具公司副经理陈从汉说，由于工厂的工作条件不是很理想，他们工厂不得不支付相当于行业平均水平两倍的工资。因此，在四年前，樱奥厨具开始引入机器人以降低日益昂贵的人力成本。
现在，樱奥厨具公司有9个机器人，他们每天所能够完成的工作量相当于过去140位全职员工一天所能够完成的工作量。机器人的机械臂娴熟地从堆场中拿出水槽的半成品，精心打磨不锈钢水槽，然后放回到自动传送带上，送到连接着计算机的摄像头前完成最后一道质检工序。
樱奥厨具的产量达到每天1500个水槽，而为了购买这些机器人，樱奥厨具花费了300多万美元。陈从汉说：“这些机器人比工人更廉价、更精确、更可靠”，他随之感慨“机器人从来没有弄砸过一批产品，我想以后要用更多的机器人来替代产业工人”。
工业机器人经过编程后可以长时间从事重复性工作
中国的南方沿海有着一条长达上千公里的加工制造业产业集聚带，很多像樱奥厨具那样的公司现在都在政府的支持下走上了生产自动化的道路，这么大规模的自动化浪潮是全球罕见的。自从2013年以来，中国每年新增购买的工业机械的数量比世界上任何国家都要多，包括德国、日本、韩国等高新技术制造业的大国。根据国际机器人联合会（一个总部设在“工业机器人之都”德国的机器人产业协会——观察者网注）的预测，到今年年末，中国就将取代日本成为世界上拥有工业机器人最多的国家。该联合会秘书长古德伦·利岑贝格尔表示，中国加工制造业自动化的进程之快，在世界历史上也是独一无二的。
就技术转型而言，中国还有很长的一段路要走——中国当前平均每一万名产业工人只拥有36台工业机器人，而在德国、日本和韩国，这一数字分别达到292、314和478。但是，中国现在的行动已经在逐渐改变全球制造业的生态了。这一过程激发了人们开始思考一个更宏大的问题：新兴经济体能否复制发达国家在英国18世纪工业革命后走过的老路？还是说，工业机器人将能承担大多数的工作岗位？要知道，这些工作岗位曾经帮助上亿人脱离贫困。
中国政府现在十分积极地推动工业机器人的应用，而且机器人应用也受到中国经济的内在驱动。从上世纪80年代起，改革开放的中国参与到世界贸易体系当中，而此时中国庞大而廉价的劳动力使其成为世界最大的工业产品输出国。举世瞩目的经济发展成果不仅使上亿人脱离了贫困，还改变了中国的社会阶层，因为许多农民从农村涌入城市，成为了产业工人。越来越多的中国人成为了中产阶级，而中国的人口老龄化现象也愈发严重，中国的平均工资开始上涨，这削弱了其原有的竞争优势。眼下，中国有适龄劳动人口1亿人，但是由于计划生育的政策效应，预计到2030年，中国适龄劳动力将减少至9600万人，到2050年更是将减少到8000万人。尽管“二孩”已经全面放开，但是可能仍然无力扭转中国劳动力减少的趋势。
近些年来，中央政府的决策者们开始积极推动工业自动化，以对冲劳动力减少所带来的经济社会问题。中国政府，主要是地方政府，向生产、购买和使用机器人的制造企业提供大量的财政补贴，这为中国企业更多地使用和制造机器人铺平了道路。2014年，中国国家主席习近平提出了“机器人革命”的设想，他认为机器人革命将首先改变中国，然后改变整个世界。同年6月，习近平在两院院士大会的讲话上提出，“我国将成为机器人的最大市场，但我们的技术和制造能力能不能应对这场竞争？我们不仅要把我国机器人水平提高上去，而且要尽可能多地占领市场。”
工业机器人的价格已经有了显著的下降，而性能却在不断地增强，这加速了中国和世界机器人产业的发展。波士顿咨询公司预测，工业机器人及其配套软件的价格将在未来10年内降低20%，但工作效率和工作性能每年会有5%的提升。
四十多岁的企业家刘辉（音）赶上了中国机器人发展的大潮。2001年，他在佛山——广东一座有着700万人口的工业城市——开了自己的第一家工厂，主要生产“山寨”电风扇。随着业务的发展，他跳槽到贝纳化电公司，这家公司主要为中国家电企业生产零配件。2012年，他看准了中国机器人产业的市场，进入了这个行业。他现在从瑞典瑞士合资的ABB电器等公司进口机械臂，然后转卖给中国的制造企业，帮助他们在生产线中应用自动化工具。这个生意具有很高的专业性。他的大多数客户都是马达和其他家电零配件的制造商，这些产品最终流向美的、格兰仕等生产空调、冰箱的中国知名家电企业。
他的业务发展很快，以至于从去年开始，他的工厂里都腾不出地方来安放那些正待组装的设备了。他不得不将那些服务于价值23000美元的ABB机器人的备件临时储存在厂房外搭建的简易棚屋内。他感慨道，“事情变化太快，工人工资每年都在上涨，而且年轻人不愿意像他们的父辈那样在生产线上干活了，因此我们一定要发展机器人来取代他们。”
在很多地方，中国的工厂仍然是这种传统的形式：成千上万的工人坐在流水线上，或踩着缝纫机，或在往集成电路板上焊接元件。但是，现在中国的制造业开始有所改变，人与机器人各司其职，机器人往往负责在流水线上工作，而工人则分散在几个关键工序节点处。
与此同时，中国也在积极发展自己的机器人制造企业。去年九月，主营塑料产业机械设备的上交所上市公司宁波弘讯发起成立了一家子公司“伊雪松机器人设备”，它生产的机器人比国际上的竞争对手，如ABB、德国库卡、日本川崎等公司的同类型设备便宜20%至30%。伊雪松的工厂设在佛山，有咖啡厅、室外休闲区和开放的生产线，看上去和硅谷高科技创业企业的办公室别无二致，一点都不像中国的老式工厂。伊雪松35岁的技术总监张洪磊（音）表示，“国际上的竞争对手非常擅长制造机器人，但是它们的生产成本比我们高，而且他们不像我们那样了解本地顾客的需求”。
今年，他们计划生产350台全身绿色的机器人，这些机器人专为塑料生产企业打造，每台售价预计在14000美元至18000美元之间。他希望在三年内，公司的产能能够达到每年3000台。他说，“我们必须要迅速扩张，因为自动化产业是一个规模经济的产业，市场份额越大越好。”
全球去年总共售出了24万台工业机器人，而中国的工业企业购买了其中的6.6万台。国际机器人联合会的古德伦·利岑贝格尔表示，中国企业仍然倾向于购买国际知名品牌的工业机器人。但是她认为这一情况将在近年内被扭转，尤其是中国政府在大力支持国内的机器人产业。“中国的机器人制造业发展的势头十分迅猛”，她说。
佛山市顺德区的政府官员们正积极响应习近平主席“机器人革命”的号召。广东省政府表示，将在2015年至2017年间投资80亿美元促进工业自动化的发展。响应中央“八项规定”的精神，顺德区经济和科技促进局常务副局长张鹏缩小了自己的办公室，但是区财政支持工业自动化的预算丝毫没有受到影响。张鹏表示，机器人对于应对中国劳动力短缺，帮助中国企业生产质量更好、更有竞争力的产品而言，是十分重要的。他直言不讳地说道，如果企业不顺应这种潮流，就不能在市场中生存。
政府正大力支持更便宜、更高效的机器人进入中国的企业，这对于中国的工厂主们来说无疑是一个天大的好消息。眼下，他们正面临着全球经济低迷和国内需求下滑的挑战。
在国家产业政策的支持下，中国已经进入工业机器人爆发式增长的时代
机器人革命带来的成果并不会由全世界均等地共享。印度、印尼、埃及、埃塞俄比亚这样的发展中国家十分向往能够模仿中国、日本、韩国和台湾地区过去的发展路径：鼓励农村的农民成为廉价的产业工人，生产出口商品以刺激经济和就业。但是，工业自动化意味着工业化未来在新兴经济体中创造的就业岗位将会越来越少。
美国花旗银行投资银行部和牛津大学的研究人士在最近发表的一份报告《过去不可复制》中表示，“今天的低收入国家将不太可能通过把农村劳动力赶进城市来刺激经济发展”，而这是科技发展的结果。他们认为，中国日益上升的劳动力成本其实是中国经济的希望，因为这迫使中国的技术进步，正如同18世纪的英国工人工资的不断上涨推动了第一次工业革命的发生那样。与此同时，花旗银行（香港）的经济学家乔安娜·蔡表示，亚非拉工业比较落后的国家面临的是“与机器的竞赛”，他们希望能够在中国组建起机器人军团之前创造足够多的制造业工作岗位。
印尼45岁的贸易部长汤姆·姆蓬是印尼经济自由化的先锋人士，他积极推动东南亚最大经济体——印度尼西亚的政府改革。他十分清楚地认识到了当前印尼面临的风险和挑战：“许多人还没反应过来，我们面临的是机器人跨时代的技术进步。这是一个大问题，我们必须要清晰地认识新工业革命。但是身为政界、商界精英的我们，竟然还停留在对工业化的辩论当中——这是我们在20世纪甚至19世纪早该做的事情啊。”
像印度尼西亚这样的国家已经在经历像哈佛大学经济学家丹尼·罗德里克戏称的“过早的去工业化”。这表明了这样的一种趋势，在新兴经济体远未达到和发达国家旗鼓相当的收入水平时，制造业就开始萎缩。尽管在过去十五年间经济极速增长，印度尼西亚的工业经济占比的顶峰却是在2002年。分析家们认为部分原因是对于基础设施的投资失利，国家在贸易投资政策方面缺乏竞争力，当然全球化也有一定的影响。
罗德里克认为印度尼西亚未来不可能达到诸如中国或韩国的高速增长速度。“传统情况下，制造业就是雇佣很多人，但是对技术要求很低，”他说。“由于自动化，技术需求急剧增长，运营工厂需要的人比以前要少很多。你怎么处理这些多余的工人呢？他们不会转入信息科技公司或是娱乐业，而且如果他们成为餐厅打工者，他们会比在工厂中收入更低。”
他认为，机器人的推广会让发展中国家搭上经济增长的“直升电梯”变得更难。印度尼西亚总人口2.55亿，其中40%的人口每日的生活成本低于三美金。对于预计每年进入工作的两百万年轻人而言，这无疑是个坏消息。Mahami Jaya Lumbanraja是印度尼西亚工业岛巴淡岛上的一位22岁的求职者，他正感受着过早去工业化的影响。七个月来，他一直在离繁华的新加坡仅20英里的巴淡岛上寻找工厂中的工作机会，却一直没找到。
穿着褪色牛仔裤和灰色卫衣，脸上挂着讨人喜欢微笑的Lumbanraja说，尽管他在日本禧玛诺（Shimano，自行车齿轮和钓鱼器具制造商——观察者网注）公司工作了一年，但他的这些经验最多只能帮他争取到一个初级岗位，而且找工作的人远比空缺的岗位要多。“靠我卖艺和帮朋友做一些建筑工作赚的小钱够生活了，但是我必须找到一个工厂里的工作，我才能够存够钱以后自己开一个小店”，他说。在巴淡岛的工作收入是每个月230美金，是Lumbanraja在他家乡苏门答腊岛的城市梅兰收入的两倍。所以他认为自己必须坚持下去，直到找到工作为止。
Lumbanraja是每天到巴淡民都工业园的社区中心寻找工作的700个20岁左右的年轻人中的一个。今年2月，3000人申请了日资电线公司发布的80个职位。申请工作的人太多，以至于管理人员开始以为是劳工抗议活动。
巴淡民都工业园是新加坡和印度尼西亚的合作成果，1990年成立，并受到了两国受人尊敬的领袖李光耀和苏哈托的支持。原先巴淡民都是印度尼西亚工业化战略的样板。但是恰恰事与愿违。近些年，每年平均5家工厂从工业园搬到别的国家，工业园的工人数量也从2000年顶峰的8万人下降到仅有4.6万人。尽管当下的工资只有中国广东省的三分之一到一半，但情况依然严峻。
Lembong毕业于哈佛大学，在其去年八月被任命为贸易部长之前自己经营着总部位于新加坡的私募股权公司。他说政府已经下定决心解决印尼经济萎靡的两个核心问题：基础设施薄弱和监管过度。
但一些人认为改革来得太晚了。中国在其高速工业化阶段投资了现代化的公路、铁路和港口以支持其制造业。相反，巴淡岛和印度尼西亚许多地方的基础设施“自20世纪70年代以来几乎就没怎么变过“，巴淡民都总经理Mook Sooi Wah说。
尽管在中国大力推动自动化进程之下，情况发生了巨大变化，但在国际机器人联合会（IFR）2014年整理的最新数据时，印度尼西亚的“机器人密度”略高于中国。这种异常现象很大程度上是因为中国制造业劳动力规模远大于印度尼西亚，印度尼西亚在工业自动化上仍未得到政府的计划和支持。
印度尼西亚的监管流程就和其基础设施一样陈腐。最近，巴丹口岸海关依据禁止出口非法来源木材的规定扣押了一家造纸厂的合法出口货物。在巴丹岛的支持者们十分愤怒的情况下，这些问题仍然没有解决。
斯特凡·罗尔是一个德国制造业老手，在20世纪90年代工业腾飞的时候在中国工作，他非常享受在印度尼西亚生活和工作。但是他对于印度尼西亚非常担忧，认为它错过了“黄金机会”，很难变得足够高效进而在全球市场中竞争。“当你在民族问题上浪费时间时，时间就是金钱。”罗尔在他在巴丹的新工厂出现时说道，这家工厂为雀巢公司组装咖啡机。“但是如果你有良好的道路和基础设施，你可以进行即时生产（其实质是保持物质流和信息流在生产中的同步，实现以恰当数量的物料，在恰当的时候进入恰当的地方，生产出恰当质量的产品。这种生产模式可以减少库存、缩短工时、降低成本、提高生产效率，1953年由日本丰田公司提出——观察者网注）。”
虽然很少人怀疑发展中国家面临的挑战是艰巨的，但不是每个人都在如此暗淡的时期看到了两面性。印度尼西亚和印度的工资相比中国低很多，并且人口相对来说年轻化，一些分析师相信他们可以吸引更多的劳动力密集产业，例如服装生产这种大规模自动化还不适合的产业。
“当中国产业升级时，将为东南亚和印度释放许多机会”，香港投资银行汇丰银行的机器人产业分析师安德森说。
波士顿咨询公司的制造业专家哈尔·西尔金说，从印度等经济体的角度来看，现在布局自动化已经行不通了，因为这会抬高物价——“当他们有十亿人可以廉价地生产东西时”。他是技术乐观派的一员，他们相信从中期来看，自动化也将为新兴经济体创造新的业务领域，从而缓和工作岗位减少所带来的伤害。
“我们相信相比规模提升，未来会在本土化上有更多的发展”，西尔金说。“我可以开一家工厂，去改变软件和所有的制成品，而不是将百万数量提升到五百万或一千万。”
但是牛津大学的就业和技术专家卡尔·弗雷警告称，如果没有更好的教育和更多的技能，发展中国家将很难从制造业的进步中获益。
“技术技能的要求越来越高，由于很多发展中国家缺乏足够的熟练劳动力，他们在应用这些新技术时面临着极大劣势。”
中国自己也不能对自动化的负面影响免疫。14亿人口中的四成多仍然生活在乡村，他们大多数过着贫穷的生活，仅仅享受到城市经济奇迹所带来的微小福利。
但是，政府相信推动前沿制造业技术的利润将远远超过它所带来的潜在失业的危害。去年中国政府宣布的工业战略——被称作“中国制造2025”——不仅为了提高中国产业界的技术能力而设计，也旨在支持中国国际形象的发展。
汇丰银行分析师周先生说，中国企业为了增加出口和缓解国内经济放缓的影响，他们更可能专注于提升产品的质量：“产品质量方面的进步变得更重要。”
每年，各公司在机器人领域投入的回收周期都在急剧缩短，这使得让中国自动化领域的小公司和工厂做出投资变得富有吸引力。举例来说，根据花旗数据分析师的计算，2010年至2015年间，中国一个焊接机器人的投资回收期从5.3年降低到了1.7年。而到2017年，投资回收期将缩减到1.3年。
自动化不仅仅是将更加便宜且高效的机械臂安装在生产线上。一家销售定制家居用品的公司——尚品宅配家居总经理李感（音）说。更好的机遇是工业机器人和来自顾客和自动化逻辑系统的实时数据的协同合作。
尚品宅配位于佛山的工厂在利用机器人后，其生产率比原来提高了40%
由于使用机器人，尚品宅配位于佛山的工厂在2014年的生产率比原来提高了40%，雇用的工人却少了20%。2014年年末，该公司打算全力开动其最先进、最大生产基地的所有机器，通过利用更多机器人将原材料搬运到工厂，再把制成品装入准备出口的集装箱，在拥有两倍于原来员工的情况下就可以将生产率提升到原有的四倍。
过去，公司生产床、衣柜等定制家具的钻孔环节，是一项非常痛苦且危险的工作。现在，工人只需简单挑选板条、扫描条形码，然后把它们放到传送带上就可以了。传送带将板条传给机械臂进行加工，完成后再由另一传送带送出。加工过程非常复杂：尚品需要设计一种设备，确保正确对齐每一块板条，以便机械臂抓取；板条冲钻规格也要提前编程好，并录入条形码信息，因为这些机器人还没有任何人工智能功能。李感指出，人工监督和决策仍然很关键。“自动化只是一种技术手段，更重要的是，我们要思考如何将事情做到最好。”他说，“每当改变一件事情，我们就会问：做这件事情，机器人或者人工，哪个效率更高？”
波士顿咨询预测，到2020年，在中国、德国、日本、韩国、美国的影响下，由先进机器人完成的任务比重将由现在8%上升到十年后的26%，这些国家购入的机器人数量将占市场总量的80%。西尔金说，自动化的迅速扩张，就像“摩尔定律”与“人类学习曲线”的差别。他说：“即使人类做的特别好，但每十年才能将生产力翻一翻。”与此相对的是，研究人员能够推动机器人的发展，每隔四年就能让生产力翻一番。“假以时日，两者间会出现巨大差距。”
随着中国和其他行业领先者打造出更多、更好的机器人，机器人能接手的任务也会增加。比如屠宰场，人们一直认为，屠宰要求的技能是机器人难以掌握的，因为需要非常精细的手眼协同动作，而且需要处理的肉块也不规则。但是，西尔金观察到，由于使用了更廉价、更敏感的传感器，机器在去除多余肥肉时比人还高效“。让机器人完成这种工作正变得经济可行，因为你能比人工操作多保留3%或4%的肉——在一条运转迅速的生产线上，这将产生巨大价值。”
他补充说到，“有很多的事情，人类比机器人做的好。但是，这样的事会越来越少。”
（青年观察者张成、王欣译自4月28日英国《金融时报》）
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从2010年开始，西方媒体开始有计划的营造这样的舆论环境：制造业要回归美国，中国制造会因为成本提升而崩溃。支撑这个观点的第一个依据是3D打印，第二个依据是页岩气导致的能源成本降低，第三个依据则是智能制造机器人。
结果是什么？对于3D打印，一方面中国的3D打印技术世界领先，另一方面事实已经证明3D打印并不适用于大量标准化的工业生产，而且其强度不能保证。
对于页岩气，一方面中国在外国进口煤炭，有效降低能源成本，另一方面国际能源价格暴跌，美国大量相关企业破产，美国媒体的脸被打烂。
现在又轮到机器人了，美国媒体天天鼓吹机器人会让中国制造崩溃。现在看这种鼓吹很有效果，确实让中国产生了很强的危机感，开始大力发展智能制造。最终的结果是什么呢？一定是机器人革命在中国大爆发，中国制造全方位完成更新换代，产业升级，生产效率大幅提升。美国媒体再次搬起石头砸自己的脚。
无论是3D打印，页岩气革命，还是机器人。对于美国媒体来讲无外乎是战略忽悠，骗骗蠢人罢了。谎话说得多了，没准别人真的信了。但美国人的忽悠方法似乎有问题。
中国经历了百年耻辱，直到今天，中国人脑子里想的最核心问题就是自强，你说中国不行，说中国药丸。中国人不会被吓倒，反倒会仔细研究你说我哪里不行，之后虚心接受，解决问题。
事实上，真实对中国人有效的忽悠方法是捧杀，让中国人自我感觉良好，这样慢慢不思进取，中国慢慢就完蛋了。
战略忽悠的战略错误，事实上只是西方针对中国众多战略失误中的一个。比如西方认为中国经济会崩溃，结果崩溃30年了，成长了几十倍。再比如西方认为中国会被和平演变，颜色革命，结果现在美国自己就要被革命了。还有，西方认为中国入世之后将沦为西方的经济殖民地，结果呢，可能再过几年，西方的所有工业品都被中国垄断，只能向中国出口矿产原料了。
