3
1.2
Changes since the 2011 study
Because the effects of the recession were hard to judge even in 2011, the base data in the original study was taken as 2008. The update has focused on new employment resulting from robotics. The estimates show:
New jobs due to Robotics
Total
Up to and including 2008
8 to 10 million
2008 to 2011
500,000 to 750,000
2012 to 2016
900,000 to 1.5 million
2017 to 2020
1 to 2 million
Metra Martech
The update material also allows several important observations:
That Chinese growth has not been stopped, but it has been restricted and this situation is likely to remain for several years. This reduces world growth by several percent.
The three driving forces for using robotics, whether or not they generate new jobs, which will be mentioned again later, are: I Where the product cannot be made to satisfactory precision, consistency and cost, without Robotics. This factor is expected to continue to grow in importance as technology advances. II Where the conditions under which the current work is done are unsatisfactory [may be illegal in the developed countries], but where a robot will operate. The recession has reduced attention on this factor. III Where [particularly] a developed country manufacturing unit with high labour costs is threatened by a unit in a low labour cost area. This is a critical factor in the re-balancing of the world manufacturing economies.
China for example, is increasingly facing low cost competition and as Chinese employment costs rise, we can expect more use of robotics to maintain competitiveness. Korea has greatly increased its robot density over the past three years.
Metra Martech