If you think about the Great Wall of China, it is one of the world’s great construction projects however it was built with by humans with little machinery, they had tools but not machinery. How was it done? the emperor at the time brought in recruits from the lands he conquered or slave labor. For many years, people could and can do many things, but add a machine and the whole economy advances as machines enabled more to be done. If you think about farming, prior to the tractors made by John Deere, farms were generally 100 acres or less. After the tractor and other farming machinery the farms get much bigger to feed the world.

In 2022, companies across North America spent $2 billion for almost 40,000 robots to help them with record demand and shortage of bodies. There is wonderful You Tube video about how robots help build the Ford 150 truck and robots in the auto plant have been there for decades. Now robots are doing more work in companies to meet the demands of consumers.

In an article by Timothy Aeppel, the Association for Advancing Automation or A3, is the industry group for robots, reported the share of robots going to non-auto companies grew further in 2021. Some of the fastest growth in orders came from the metals, food and consumer goods category.

The number one driver for automation is the labor storage in manufacturing, said Joe Campbell, a senior manager in applications development at Universal Robots, a unit of Masschusetts based Teradyne which specializes in co-bots.

A field which has resisted robots is the construction business, but Universal sold a robot to a company that uses them to install drywall.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, business are in the business of finding solutions. Customers pay for the solution and they typically give little thought how the process works as long as the end result makes them happy. The process works till it does not, robots help companies maintain production cycles and the robots are beginning to do the more flexible jobs many thought you needed people to do. As long as people have access to income, companies will be doing more with robots and investors will like it. In your company investments, how do they use robots?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.