Next year, Adidas will start selling sneakers made by robots in Germany

Concerns about the disappearance of jobs due to the automation of production continue to come true: Adidas will soon begin selling sneakers made on fully robotic assembly lines.

The prototype of the Speedfactory factory was introduced by the company in its native Germany on Thursday. On 4,600 square meters, the shoes of the famous sports brand are made automatically with the help of robots - in contrast to the current production, where the shoes are sewn by hand from residents of various Asian countries.
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So far, the factory in the Bavarian city of Ansbach is still being completed, but by next year, production will begin its return to Germany, from where it moved out of economic considerations to Asia twenty years ago. The production was transferred there by the French industrialist Bernard Tapi , who bought Adidas with borrowed money in 1989.

For a long time, the relocation of production to Asia was economically justified: because of the extremely low standard of living, working labor — the main expenditure item of production — was extremely cheap there. But after spending some time as a global factory, the region is gradually getting out of poverty, and wages begin to rise .

True, advocates of returning production to their native land are unlikely to be happy - it will not mean an increase in the number of jobs at all. Nowadays about a million people work at Adidas facilities in Asia - but the opening of automated production in Germany is unlikely to lead to the emergence of a large number of vacancies.

Adidas has been much and strongly criticized about the organization of its “ sweat factory ” in its Asian production facilities - jobs with terrible, inhuman conditions. This was especially bad in Indonesia. Human rights activists blamed the company for local workers paying £ 10 a week. The company is justified that it cannot control its contractors who are directly involved in the organization of production.

So far, Adidas has argued that it is not going to completely transfer all of its production to automatic rails. Six Asian contractors for the company either didn’t say anything to Deutsche Welle about the new plant, or said they didn’t know about it.

The first trial batch of 500 pairs will go on sale at the end of this year, and already in the next production will reach the estimated capacity. Adidas was informed that t-shirts for the German national football team might also be made at the same facility.

The company plans to build the following Speedfactory in the USA in 2017, and behind it the same production facilities in Britain and / or France. Competitors are still lagging behind - only Nike is currently developing plans to automate production.