Adidas opens second robot factory with only 150 human employees

April 26, according to the US “Commercial Insider” website, Adidas recently opened its second smart factory, Speedfactory, in Atlanta, United States. The fully automated factory occupies approximately 74,000 square feet (about 6,874 square meters), but there are only 150 human employs.

Adidas's first Speedfactory in Germany, covering about 4,600 square meters, was officially put into production last year. The company stated that its goal is to achieve a combined annual output of 1 million pairs of plants by 2020. Although this number sounds great, it is still only a fraction of the total annual output of Adidas. In fact, using high-tech technologies such as the 3d printer and AI, this factory can achieve the expected effect.

In 2017, Adidas produced 403 million pairs of shoes, which produced an average of more than 1 million pairs per day. For Adidas, the biggest significance of the emergence of smart factories is to explore new technologies and be closer to consumers. How to? By providing more intimate and different customized products and services. Its greatest feature is "customer customization." Gil Steyaert, the executive committee member of Adidas Global Operations, said that Speedfactory "will complement our main source of supply. They will never replace our main source of supply."

In addition, Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted said in an interview with reporters recently that SpeedFactory is an experiment and an attempt for future technology that helps meet the needs of some niche markets, but since SpeedFactory's production is limited, there is no significant and absolute influence to the production pattern.

So far, Adidas has only employed about 150 employees in Speedfactory in the United States. This relatively low figure means that using automation technology, it is economically feasible to set up factories in a country that lacks high-skilled shoe workers. This indeed indicates the future development trend of the footwear industry.