Hon Hai, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and owner of Foxconn, recently announced that it intends to build a robot-making factory and replace 500,000 workers with robots over the next few years.
It already has 10,000 robots busy at work in its factories, and the plan is to increase the number of robots to one million by 2013.
Hon Hai now has about 800,000 employees and a yearly revenue of about $60 billion. The company signed a letter of intent to invest $3.3 billion in robots for its Taiwan factories. He said the robots will increase the production value of Foxconn by about $4 billion over the next three to five years and create about 2,000 new jobs. It plans to build most of the robots itself, due to lack of production speed from some suppliers. Seems like some of the science fiction stories of robots making robots are coming true. The name Singularity leaps to mind.