Foxconn, the Chinese assembler for the iPhone and iPad, revealed on Sunday that the company will soon start replacing man-power with robots.

You would expect that an assembly line where one worker only performs a repetitive 3 second long action for 10 hours a day, would have some form of robotic automation already in place.

But as it turns out, that even welding, spraying and assembling your iPhone, was done by some of the 1.2 million employees of Foxconn and only 10,000 robots to back them up.

Foxconn founder, Terry Gou, unveiled his plans to increase the robotic power to 300,000 units by next year, and one million within the next three years, in an attempt to pursue better efficiency and production yield.

This is obviously a good development for the company: Foxconn already had 20 suicides, because of the unbearable life at the conveyor belt. Robots will not complain about that, will not ask for salary raise and will not leak trade secrets as it happened with some Apple products.

Foxconn is obviously doing this with the certainty that Apple will continue assembling the iPhone and the iPad from them. But Apple has already been looking at Pegatron as an assembly line for the upcoming iPad 3.

Is it safe to make such a huge investment when you are relying on other companies for your survival?

 

(Source: Forbes)