Across the world, the pace of industrial automation is steadily accelerating. According to the International Federation of Robotics, there were 66 installed industrial robots per 10,000 employees globally in 2015 and that increased to 74 in 2016. Broken down by region, average robot density in Europe is 99 units per 10,000 workers, while’s it’s 84 in the Americas and 63 in Asia. Even though China has recorded the most dynamic development of robot density in recent years, South Korea has the highest level of density of any country on the planet.
In 2016, South Korea had 631 industrial robots per 10,000 employees and that’s primarily due to the continued installation of high volume robots in the electronics and manufacturing sectors. Singapore comes second with 488 robots per 10,000 employees, 90 percent of which are installed in its electronics industry. In Germany and Japan, two countries renowned for their automotive industries, the robot density is just over 300 per 10,000 workers. Japan is actually the world’s predominant manufacturer of industrial robots, accounting for 52 percent of global supply.
There is a gap to the United States where the pace of automation is somewhat slower with 189 industrial robots per 10,000 employees. China saw its robot density rate grow from 25 units in 2013 to 68 by 2016. This is expected to expand steadily in the years to come with the government aiming to make China one of the world’s top-10 most automated nations by 2020. In India, manual labor is still highly prevalent and the country trails by a massive distance in the automation league. In 2016, India only had three industrial robots for every 10,000 of its workers.