Robots and machine tools facing crisis

Robots and machine tools facing crisis

Robots and machine tools facing crisis

Keywords: Robots, Statistics

Long dominant in world markets, Japanese makers of robots and machine tools are now struggling to maintain their erstwhile leading position and slumping demand. It used to be common among the Japanese manufacturers to use mainly Japanese made robots and machine tools, but weak demand in the last few years has brought such Japanese concerns face to face with deepening difficulties due to cuts in capital spending by corporate customers and heightened competition from foreign firms.

At Guangzhou Honda Automobile Co., a Chinese joint venture of Honda Motor that turns out some 50,000 of the popular “Accords” a year, the use of automated production equipment now stands at only one-third the level of Japanese factories. It uses robots that are usually indispensable in welding and painting only sparingly, favoring cheaper Chinese manual labor below-paid local workers.

Japanese car plants with an annual output of 300,000 units usually use 300 to 350 robots for welding but their Thailand counterparts use only 10 percent of that number. Even in China, where the auto industry is growing briskly, demand for industrial robots will most likely “remain just constant for the time being,” says Noboru Sasaki, Head of the Robot Business Center at Japan’s third-ranking Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd firm.

Machine tool and makers have delayed taking measures to fight the lengthy slump after the collapse of Japan’s “fragile bubble economy.” They shied away from mergers that would have enabled them to obtain more efficient production and thus begin to trail European rivals in capital and technological strengths.

A remedy is being tested and new associations are under way, a chief one being Toyota Motor with Fanuc Ltd. This is deemed an embarkation on a new business association with an industrial robot maker through open bidding such as aims to nail down hefty discounts.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, robot prices have dropped 44 percent on an average from 1990 in early 2000, 2001, and 2002, and with open biddings having been introduced over the years, prices dipped more drastically by 10-15 percent. This has caused 20 percent of the robot makers to complain.

This implies that it is growing tougher to survive in the robotics sector. The number of makers fell to 145 in 2000, further to 148 in the year 2001, after peaking at 282 in 1985. Companies are still having to move quickly to strengthen their cost competitiveness, to cope with still-falling prices.

And a positive step is being taken by workers at the Yaskawa Electric plant at Kitakyushu, a main city on the major Japanese “home island” – of four – where they are busily assembling a new line of industrial robots.

It should be noted that procuring components overseas may cast a shadow on Japanese manufacturers for they are finding it more difficult, for both machine tool and robotics concerns, to enhance output technologies in conjunction with their main end-users, automakers and consumer electronics firms. Industry observers are making suggestions for safeguarding home output, one idea being to strengthen software capabilities.

Fanuc has developed an automated system that integrated 22 robot arms, one that can manage assembly of new operations for shipment to major electronic firms that used to be impossible without human labor, such as tightening screws for fluorescent light fixtures. The system’s software processes data obtained from visual, auditory, and inner force sensors to bring about fine robotic control.