Catherwood LibraryILR School

The Zhejiang province in China is planning to invest about $82 billion over 5 years to help 25,000 companies adopt more industrial robots. The push comes as average labor costs have tripled in the past 8 years due to both market growth and a labor supply gap. Surveys conducted have shown that three-quarters of employers who have adopted industrial robots did so because of increasing labor costs, and that the percent of those employers who reported labor shortage issues dropped from 80% to 56.4% in one year. The Zhejiang plan will reduce the number of workers needed by approximately 700,000, saving about 29 billion Yuan in labor costs. Many experts are citing South Korea?s explosion in the use of robotic labor once ?per capita GDP hit $6,000,? and China is already at $6,700.