Bringing Industry home after the Corona Pandemic?

In an op-ed on spiegel.de, Prof. Dr. Dalia Marin describes the opportunities for robotic and machine vision for the European market.

The basis for her argument is the WUI, the Word Uncertainty Index that skyrocketed due to the current Corona pandemic. In historical context of this Index, she assumes that global supply chains suffer massively not only during the lockdown but also in the foreseeable future by a margin of 35%.

Relocating production to low-wage countries is associated with high risk, which must be reassessed in connection with the pandemic.

As interest rates will continue to fall as a result of the crisis, a return to manufacturing and production from low-wage countries with simultaneous investment in automation and robot technology will become particularly interesting in the chemical and metal industries and the electronics industry.

In recent years, for example, it has been shown that some Central and Eastern European countries are quite interesting for outsourcing, such as Slovenia and Slovakia where there are already robots per 1000 workers as e.g. in France or the USA.

How strongly this trend towards investment in robotics will have an impact depends on how much current economic uncertainties inhibit investments in general.