
Once affordable robots reach the market and are more widely used, it can lead to the creation of ‘smart factories' and bring about far-reaching innovations to the manufacturing sector
The decision to replace cheap Chinese labor with robots comes in the context of rising wages in China but also as an attempt from South Korea to become a bigger robotics market. The global robotics business was worth $10.7 billion last year with China being in the lead and Japan following in second, with the US and South Korea competing for the third place. Robots currently account for about 10 percent of the manufacturing process worldwide and that figure could rise to 20 percent in the next ten years.