Will the global pattern of the Nike shoe robot delivery shoe industry change?

In 2013, Nike became the first customer of Grabit, a US industrial automation startup. Today, four years later, this cooperation has entered a substantive phase.

Bloomberg's latest news said that in August this year, Grabit began to provide several shoe assembly equipment to the Nike factory. These "robots" work 20 times faster than manual speed, and an employee-monitored machine can produce up to 600 per day. Pair of shoes. By the end of this year, about ten pieces of equipment will be put into operation in factories in China and Mexico.

Grabit robotics, originally from the well-known non-profit research institute SRI in Menlo Park, California. In 2013, Grabit became a new company independently, and its core technology was to study the use of electrostatic adsorption to make machines manipulate items. At the beginning of its establishment, Grabit received $25 million in financing. In addition to sports giant Nike, investors include electronics manufacturer Flex, apparel maker Esquel and South Korea's Samsung.

Nike has said that the most complicated process in the manufacturing process of sports shoes is the combination of the upper – it consists of up to 40 pieces of material heated and fused, and there is no obvious sewing marks after processing, because this work exceeds the mechanical control system. The shoe flow has been done by hand in the past.

Today, robots will either completely replace this work. Grabit's upper assembly looks like an oversized sandwich machine, which is said to automatically show the best stacking of upper materials and stack the materials. Subsequently, the platform with the electrostatic adsorption plate descends to remove the material, displaces it over a semi-finished shoe and removes the electric field, placing the shoe in the correct configuration and feeding it into the hot press.

In general, it takes 10 to 20 minutes for the manual speed to complete the above process, and the robot only takes 50 to 75 seconds. The machine can complete 300 to 600 pairs of uppers in 8 hours of work per day. However, this does not mean full mechanical work, each machine still needs an employee to supervise and control.

In fact, in the field of sports equipment, the use of intelligent robots to produce sports shoes is not new. In December 2015, Adidas opened its first home in Germany, the Speed ​​Factory, which used machines instead of manual manufacturing to reduce production costs. This year, Adidas plans to open a second home in Atlanta, followed by Western Europe. Investment bank Morgan Stanley expects that up to 20% of Nike and Adidas footwear will be produced in a more automated process in 2023.

As Nike has made substantial progress in smart manufacturing , it is no longer subject to the high cost of artificial manufacturing, which may prompt the sports giant to move the factory to large-scale core consumer markets such as Europe and the United States.

In June, Nike announced a global restructuring plan to cut 2% of the approximately 1,400 employees in June, simplifying the regional structure and focusing on 12 major cities in the future, including New York, London, and Shanghai. Beijing, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, Barcelona, ​​Seoul and Milan.

In order to be close to these key consumer markets and to save channel costs, Nike intends to move the factory closer to Europe and the United States, after the US brand established a state-of-the-art production technology research and development department in Oregon is a big signal. At the same time, markets such as China and Mexico City, where consumption potential is huge, are also valued by Nike – at the end of 2017, more than a dozen robotic production facilities will be placed in China and Mexico.

Currently, Nike has approximately 591 factories in the global region, with more than 1 million workers, mainly concentrated in the cheap labor areas of Asia. After the upgrade of the automated production process, Nike and Adidas will likely change the global landscape of the footwear industry.

It is also worth noting that as part of the global restructuring plan, on September 5, Nike began a large-scale streamlining of its operations in India, which has already laid off about 20% of its employees. Data show that US brand sales in India fell from Rs. 810 crore in the same period last year to Rs. 768 crore, and business losses increased from Rs. 10.0 billion in FY2015 to Rs. 1.7 billion in FY2016. It can be seen that in order to cope with the strong pursuit of competitors, the sports giant brand has gradually made thorough adjustments in the production process, employees and key markets.