Orders for factory robots in America are falling. A recent data release from the Robotics Industry Group, the Association for autonomous propulsion, shows that orders for robots in North American factories fell by nearly a third last year compared with the previous year, orders fell further in the first half of the year compared with the same period last year. The Wall Street Journal has reported that robots in US factories are“Out of work” as manufacturing stalls. The paper quoted executives as saying that purchases of automation equipment such as robots had been put on hold as factory production slowed.
US industrial capacity was flat in August compared with a year earlier, while production in sectors such as home appliances, heavy trucks, machine tools and oil wells fell, according to federal data. In particular, the U. S. auto industry has been highly bullish on the electric vehicle industry business opportunities, electric vehicle production lines in the deployment of a large number of robots, making the auto industry as North America’s largest industrial robot users; But as demand for electric vehicles has weakened in North , carmakers have slowed the introduction of new models and reduced robot purchases on production lines. North n auto industry orders for robots fell 20 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, the data showed. In 2022, the auto industry accounted for nearly 60 percent of robot orders across all industries, down from 46 percent in the second quarter of this year.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the covid-19 pandemic a few years ago triggered the recent wave of robotic deployments in U. S. manufacturing. During the outbreak, many manufacturing employees left, but factories had a lot of orders to deliver, leading factories facing labor shortages to enter the robot“Panic buying” mode. Recent lacklustre manufacturing orders in the U. S. and the return of workers to the hiring market have removed the main incentive for robot panic buying.
At the same time, U.S. companies are finding many problems with robotic applications in the automation process, especially the maintenance and software programming required to deploy complex tasks, it is not as simple as first thought. In addition, the United States for some time high interest rates, factory automation procurement costs are high. Executives admit it is not cost-effective to deploy robots in this situation. Analysts believe that with the Federal Reserve cut interest rates, factory automation equipment procurement costs are expected to fall, the United States factory robot deployment promotion momentum will resume, but it is difficult to reproduce the fever during the epidemic.
A new report by Bloomberg International Federation of Robotics that there were 4.3 million robots in factories worldwide at the end of last year, more than half a million robots were added to factories around the world last year. According to regional data, about 70 percent of the world’s new factory robots last year were in Asia, compared with 17 percent in Europe and 10 percent in the s. China, the world’s largest market for factory robots, added about 276,000 industrial robots last year, accounting for 51 per cent of the global total, according to national data, and demand for robots is expected to grow at a 2027 rate of 5% to 10% a year. It is worth mentioning that even in India, where labor resources are very abundant, the deployment of factory robots has been very strong. There were 8,510 robots in India’s factories last year, up 59 per cent from the year before.