The Swiss robots are coming to Shanghai

ABB is a Swedish-Swiss, Fortune 500 engineering company, the worldโ€™s largest manufacturer of electric grids, and a leading maker of automation equipment. If youโ€™re not an engineer or an investor, you may never have heard of them, but keep an eye out for their distinctive, minimalist logo, and youโ€™ll start seeing it everywhere from apartment switch boxes to billboards to nuclear power stations.

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(My first job in China was teaching English to engineers at an ABB factory on the outskirts of Beijing, which is how I first got to know the Zurich-based company. They had around 20 joint-venture factories in China in 1995.)

ABB has announced plans to build a $150 million, 75,000-square-foot robot factory in Shanghai that will open in 2020 and produce robots for China as well as for export elsewhere in Asia, according to Reuters.

  • ABB is already Chinaโ€™s largest industrial robot maker, and China is ABBโ€™s second largest robot market after the U.S.
  • As China ages and labor costs rise, companies โ€” with government encouragement โ€” are investing in automation. โ€œIn 2017, one of every three robots sold in the world went to China, which purchased nearly 138,000 unitsโ€ according to ABB stats cited by Reuters.
  • โ€œDesigned to work side-by-sideย with people,โ€ ABBโ€™s line of YuMi robots โ€œwill also be deployed on many of the small parts assembly tasksโ€ at the Shanghai robot factory.
  • Kukua, the German robotics firm acquired by Chinaโ€™s Midea in 2016, is also expanding in China, says Reuters, โ€œincluding by building a robot park in Shunde near Hong Kong.โ€

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