Next year, Adidas will plan to make its first 500 pairs of shoes at a German factory that will be largely comprised of robots. Adidas has chosen to do this in an effort to speed up production and cut labor costs. Currently, Adidas has over one million workers at its factories in Vietnam and China. The company wants to move production closer to its large customer base in Europe to speed up delivery. Adidas, which currently makes 600 million shoes a year, plans to increase that number by nearly half by 2020.
See "German Robots to Make First Adidas Running Shoes in 2016", December 9, 2015