During the election and since then, President Trump has talked about a great manufacturing rebirth and every once in a while, the President will say manufacturing is back. For those of us in northeast of the US, at the height of the automobile employment, a manufacturing plant from the big 3 – GM, Ford and Chrysler meant about 5,000 jobs in the community. Then there were a great deal of spinoff jobs to service the people in the plant. For many communities it was the best of times. Unfortunately for manufacturing in the present times, robots are becoming more and more predominate. If there are lots of robots, there are not many jobs for people.

In an article written by James Paton of the New York Times News Service, last year, China accounted for almost 3 out of 5 robots deployed globally, boosting installations to more than 350,000. A decade ago, China’s installations outnumbered Germany’s by 3-1, now it is 14-1.

The widening gap exemplifies the growing economic threat that China poses to Germany and Europe as a whole. A flood of low-cost cars, chemicals and machinery from China has hollowed out Europe’s factories contributing to the loss of 14,000 industrial jobs in Germany and fueling calls for tougher trade measures on Beijing.

Today almost half of the 5 million robots working in factories worldwide are in China, according to the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Brussels.

Germany ranked 3rd in the world behind South Korea and Singapore with about 450 robots for every 10,000 employees in 2024.

The US added 38,000 robots last year. Citing national-security concerns the FCC announced a ban on new models of foreign-made humanoid robots. (one company which makes humanoid robots is UBTECH).

It is estimated there are 7,000 humanoid robots – those at least 4’6″ were sold globally. More than half the manufacturers are in China. Although, humanoids are far from becoming more autonomous machines that can perceive and respond in real time in the physical world and China’s costs are lower than western competitors, to be commercially viable costs would have to go down 50% Mercator found.

If you go back to 2009, Germany had been leading China in robot installation.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, robotics are the trend for manufacturing and if companies that you own do not have robots something is wrong and you should seek alternatives. Robots work 24/7 and no compensation is needed for benefits, just maintenance costs. If you watch You Tube videos you can watch many videos on manufacturing with robots, that is the trend and will continue into the future with AI.

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