If you ever watched a YouTube video of how a Ford F150 or any other vehicle be made you will see many robots involved in the process. There is a reason why manufacturing plants used to hire many people and now they need less, people are still needed but there are less every year. This is good for the manufacturer because robots can work essentially 24/7, with some time down for regular maintenance. For every job function that involves a great deal of repetition, there is likely a robot for the job. If you watch a YouTube video about the Robot Games, the great deal will likely fall faster than you imagined.

In an article by Farah Stockman of the New York Times News Service, across the manufacturing companies are both large and small companies. Robots are fully utilized in the large companies because they have the resources and expecting long times of usage. However the robots are coming to the smaller companies.

To buy a robot could cost as much as $500,000 which is a lot of money for a small or medium sized company, but renting is feasible. In the article, a company called Formic, a Woodridge, Illinois company takes care of installation, training, programming and repairs. The cost is about $23 a hour roughly the same as a human.

In every smaller manufacturing plant, boxes have to be stacked on pallets to be shipped to distributors to be sent to the end customer. The stacking takes bending of the knees and use of the back, if you do it enough times, possible back injury will result. A robot solves the problem and the people can do something else and there is no particular reason to hire more people.

In the US, there are 244,000 manufacturers and 93% have fewer than 100 workers and 75% have fewer than 20, according to the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Many of these small business lack the capital and in-house knowledge to integrate new equipment into their assembly lines.

Saman Farid, CEO of Formic says this is where the opportunity is. Formic rents robots to 150 different locations. Formic’s customers are often small, family owned businesses that have to turn down orders because of lack of staffing. Automating the most arduous and repetitive jobs allows them to redirect employees to more productive tasks, keeping them satisfied (and longer employed) and boosting sales.

AAA20 Group, a Las Vegas company leases robots called palletizers that stack boxes onto pallets and wrap them in plastic for $4,950 a month.

RobCo, a German robot-leasing firm, acquired the assets of Rapid Robotics, and will open an office in San Franciso and is equipping a manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas.

Robot rentals make up a tiny but growing slice of the overall market, according to the International Federation of Robotics, an non-profit group that publishes an annual survey of robot manufacturers around the world. About 113,000 transportation and logistics robots were sold globally in 2023, up 35% from the previous year. About 5,000 were rentals.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, similar to most industries the larger companies because of the volume and money involved if they do not do it, lead the way in ensuring, in this case robots are used. A few years go by, the robots begin to come down in price, other companies start using them and when it becomes affordable smaller companies use the same processes. Rentals mean a revenue stream and after that it is doing your homework to pick a public company that is making a profit and can send dividends to you.

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