Goldman's main arguments are as follows:
China now is undergoing rapid change, this kind of changes have happened in the past, in Japan and other developed : factory automation degree of increase. Faced with rising Labour and fixed costs, the pace of automation in China is remarkable.
The rhythm of the enterprise automation is determined by the market demａnd for products quality and precision, with a economies of scale have relations.
China's car industry is a case in point. Generally speaking, the auto industry are supposed to be all industry robot (permeability) ultra high degree of automation in the industry, in fact, China's new car factory, have the robot ultra high permeability.
From October in 2014, for example, the Nissan (Nissan) dalian factory, permeability, has 83% of the robot is Nissan a high in the factory. That compares with 56 per cent penetration at nissan's guangzhou huadu plant, which opened in May 2004.
Domestic auto enterprises, such as Geely, Geely is trying to catch up, this the business to a new factory in ningbo, for example, in production process such as stamping, welding, painting, actively introducing foreign super new equipment, to replace domestic equipment, the plant capacity at about 150000 per month, using more than 100 sets of spot welding robot, compared with foreign car factory are the same.
Goldman sachs also said China's factories may be modernizing faster than expected, given the policy support:
Given the support of the Chinese policy, we believe that the "future factory" will be realized in China faster than expected (although this does not necessarily mean that it is economically beneficial).
As far as we know, a system integration enterprise is in discussion and a government at the provincial level in China by the government, industry fund investment in local scale (20 billion yuan) in build a demonstration plant, highly automated production of advanced hardware and software industry, is expected to become the overall manufacturing service provider, or become enterprises can lease the factory.
However, while there are advanced examples, it cannot be ignored that the overall level of automation in China is relatively low at present:
China is still a manufacturing centre, which represents 30% of GDP manufacturing, Chinese companies have been intensive talk about industrial 4.0, but we think that most companies actually is still unfinished 3.0 / industrial automation stage.
For example, one of the Chinese super-large compressor manufacturers in Shanghai has started to use industry 4.0 technology in the production process, but the lack of big data analysis ability/platform has limited the management and production of the enterprise to move towards a more intelligent direction.
Although China's current overall low degree of automation, labor cost and developed than in the narrow, but it is still significantly lower than the developed , therefore, of artificial to automate incentive is relatively weak. Our budget for Chinese enterprises, according to the analysis of its capital spending/revenue ratio or lower than the mature developed a manufacturing enterprise.
