Regardless of the industry involved, manufacturing companies in Asia are facing the challenge of paying fair wages while still remaining competitive. Robotics is an essential key for achieving this goal.

We have been breaking new ground in our approach to this since late 2012. To begin with, our manufacturie  was developed so as to comply with all legal requirements (which is not the norm in China) and to guarantee decent wages for the employees in our factory. We are guided by the concept of “living wage” – which basically refers to an income that allows employees to make a decent living already within a 40 hours work week without having to work additional overtime. According to ILO (International labour organisation) up to 60 hours weekly working time in total are acceptable. However in China companies across all industries greatly exceed this number of hours, some even with exploitive wages and inhumane working conditions.

GSN is proud to be a first-mover with its concept of social manufacture, especially because better working conditions generate higher labour costs at first. However, these higher costs are more than compensated for by taking two different approaches, which ultimately increase and sustain our overall competitiveness.

Firstly, a substantial part of the company's dividend is made available for reinvestment into social innovations like the living wage. Secondly, the flexible implementation of automated machines into the manufacturing process leads to an ever increasing number of machines taking over specific work sequences from the human operator. Thus robotics helps to reduce the performance pressure on manufacturing staff.

The general approach so far, however, has been to build a fully automatic machine for each product. Given the rapid developments in robotics, it will soon be possible to adapt just a few robots that can be programmed in different ways to reliably perform several work sequences up to a moderate level of complexity, regardless of the product concerned.

As a result, more and more manual operations will be performed by programmed automatic machines. For instance, GSN uses adaptive automatic machines for the latest generation of connectors with a 1.00 mm pitch (between cable and PCB). Adapting them to different numbers of poles is so cost-efficient that they are economical to use even in medium quantities. In our view, the combination of a high degree of automation and decent wages for our employees in China is the strategy of choice in order to meet the financial and social challenges of the future in the most inspiring way.