As per BCG report , the size of this coming wave of robotics is staggering: spending on robots worldwide is expected to jump from just over $15 billion in 2010 to about $67 billion by 2025. Driving this growth is a convergence of falling prices and performance improvements.
The cost of high-quality robots and components is dropping rapidly, while CPUs are getting faster, and application programming is getting easier. As robots become cheaper, smaller, and more energy efficient, they gain flexibility and finesse, increasing the breadth of potential applications.
This can transform manufacturing economics and can bring cost convergence across the globe. May not be a great news for third world economies since they thrive on cheaper cost of production to achieve sustenance. Rapid adoption to changing patterns are critical for countries like India which is labor intensive and dominates on lower cost.
If robots can lay their hands on critical and complex applications, going forward precision manufacturing can become cheaper. Smart Machines and Smart robots can become a deadly combination which can reduce lead time and improve gross quality levels thus reducing cost, but can throw a big challenge to the bottom of the pyramid.
The biggest risk will be for the supply chain. The operational architecture of production facility will change dramatically and localization can be achieved much rapidly. Smart Factories will become much easier to create at any local points which are closer to the market since labor will become a less critical factor.
Countries depending on manufacturing as their critical base have to get prepared for the changes as the regional difference will become null with the replacement of human work force with robots. Countries should start investing more into creating robotic infrastructure which can become the source of attraction for new investments.
The industrial sector which has invested around $6bln in 2010 on robotics will double the same by 2015 and will cross around $16bln by 2020.
Estimating the global manufacturing labor costs at $6 trillion annually, McKinsey forecast that advanced robotics could have an economic impact on the manufacturing sector of between $720 billion to $1.45 trillion annually.
Robotics is at an inflection point. Like mobile and technology revolution this can bring about sweeping changes to the global economies on their structural growth, but then the impact on independent countries will depend on their ability to adopt to changes.
