From PC World: Foxconn Technology Group’s plan for a “robot army” won’t come as quickly as originally anticipated, according to its CEO.
For years now, the iPhone manufacturer has been talking about using robots to do some of the jobs done by humans at its factories. Back in February, CEO Terry Gou said he expected the automation to account for 70 percent of his company’s assembly line work in three years.
But on Thursday, Gou backtracked from those statements, claiming that media reports had misquoted him.
“It should be that in five years, the robots will take over 30 percent of the manpower,” he said during the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Taipei.
Foxconn aims to eventually create factories that are more robot-powered, but that will take ten to fifteen years, Gou added. For now, the company still largely relies on human workers. In China alone, it has over a million employees, many of whom work on the company’s assembly lines.
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