When Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics subcontractor, decided robots were the solution to its high volume production headaches, the latest much vaunted hope for future jobs followed its mines, mills and manufacturing predecessors on the giant slide towards redundancy. In July 2011, the Taiwan-based multinational announced its intention to increase its contingent of 10,000 robots to 300,000 in 2012 and 1 million within three years.
Foxconn’s Terry Gou, whose company supplies firms including Apple, Sony and Hewlett Packard and currently has more than one million employees worldwide, endorsed the trend towards automation in brutally frank language. In January 2012 he told the official Chinese news agency Xinhua: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”