KUKA's first overseas robot factory settled in Shanghai

In March 2014, KUKA, one of the world's four largest robot manufacturers, opened the world's first overseas factory outside of Germany in Shanghai. The new factory covers an area of u200bu200b20,000 square meters and mainly produces KUKA industrial robots and consoles. The annual production capacity of automobile welding and assembly processes reaches 5,000 units, accounting for one-third of KUKA's total global production. 'The choice to set up a factory in China is mainly because of the huge robot market space in China.' Kong Bing, CEO of KUKA China, said in an exclusive interview with the first financial reporter. Generally speaking, the development trend of robots has changed from the huge mechanism of special-purpose robots in the early days to the simplification of robots in the later period, including the simplification of structure. With the development of large-scale integrated circuits in the electronics industry, in fact, the development of robots and their update speed are getting faster and faster. Then the trend in the future is that robots will be used in more industrial production, and there will be more and more requirements for human-computer interaction. The second trend is that the structure of the robot will be more simplified, possibly lighter or simpler in structure. The third trend is closely related to our daily life. There may already be more cleaning robots and auxiliary robots, which can also be regarded as a category of robots. Some Silicon Valley giants, such as Google and Amazon, have also begun to invest in the robot market. They are more interested in robots entering the field of daily life from the industrial field in the traditional field. Kong Bing said that from this point of view, their Intervention can promote the extensive development of robots, from purely industrial applications to future life applications. One of the hotter topics about robots in the international community is, will robots take away our jobs? With the development of robots, this topic has actually been talked about all the time. From the actual development point of view, the coordination between machines and people is developing in a relatively harmonious way. As the number of robots increases, people's lives become easier and easier. Because in the past, our people were mainly concentrated in traditional labor-intensive industries, such as workers in the assembly line of some electronics factories, Kong Bing said: 'Once machines can replace the parts done by humans, the power of people will be released, and there will be new From this point of view, there is no contradiction between humans and robots.' With the increase in the use of robots, people's life will become more pleasant or easier, and some new fields, such as services or Other industries will be developed. At present, in general, the largest application of robots is in the automotive industry. Kong Bing said: 'It can't be completely limited to automobiles. Our current user base has greatly expanded to industries other than automobiles. Electronics, 3C, mobile phones, general industries, including food and beverages. There is a lot of demand for robots in various places.' KUKA's only with our customers and with the development of the market, and we are also firmly optimistic about the Chinese market.' The factory set up by KUKA Robot in China is currently the first in the world besides the German headquarters. It is also the only factory in China. Kong Bing said: 'China's robot market still has a lot of room for development. In developed countries, labor costs have reached a certain height, so the utilization rate of machines is much higher than in China. On average, we probably even connect other people's robots. Less than one tenth of the total.' The current labor cost has greatly increased compared to 3 to 5 years ago, and from the perspective of human factors or respect for workers, the increase in labor costs will remain in the future. At a certain height, the return on investment in robotics today is still worthwhile. Kong Bing said: 'The robot itself does not depend entirely on cost, and China's demographic dividend is disappearing. If we want to reach the minimum level of Europe and the United States, in my opinion, how to improve the quality of robot use.' Kong Bing He said that at present, we are not looking for the market, but the market is driving robot manufacturers to use robots to better realize some processes, or mass production of parts, or to improve its intelligent equipment and intelligent manufacturing level. Therefore, from the current point of view, the entire development of Chinese robots is a stage of growth rather than an average stage.