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... Some companies are giving up on new initiatives altogether, with the founder of mining company Fortescue, Andrew Forrest, claiming that his recent trip to China led to him abandoning attempts to produce EV powertrains in-house.
"There are no people " everything is robotic," he told The Telegraph.
Other executives recalled touring "dark factories" that don't even need to keep the lights on, as most work is being done around the clock by robots.
"You get this sense of a change, where China's competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad," British energy supplier Octopus CEO Greg Jackson told the newspaper.
According to recent figures by the International Federation of Robotics, China has deployed orders of magnitude more industrial robots than Germany, the US, and the UK.
And it's not just a desire to keep margins low through the automation of human labor.
"China has quite a notable demographic problem but its manufacturing is, generally, quite labor-intensive," Bismarck Analysis analyst Rian Whitton told The Telegraph. "So in a pre-emptive fashion, they want to automate it as much as possible, not because they expect they'll be able to get higher margins -- that is usually the idea in the West -- but to compensate for this population decline and to get a competitive advantage." ...
