Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 1, 2017 (I)

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(1) Dexter Roberts and Rachel Chang with Thomas Black, China's Robot Revolution.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... -for-robot-industry

Quote (print):

"Inside a lab at Beijing-based e-commerce giant JD.com Inc, a spiderlike robot plunges from its gray frame, seizes a book on a conveyor belt with its suctioning claws, and throws it into a crate. The machine, developed for use in automated warehouses, can sort 3,600 objects an hour—four times as many as a human can. Almost 1,200 miles away, in a break room at E-Deodar Robot Equipment Co[, Ltd 广东伊雪松机器人设备有限公司]'s factory in south China's Pearl River Delta manufacturing hub, a human-looking droid is deftly handling a more mundane task: serving workers coffee. Both are key to the mainland's hopes to rule the market for service robots that can handle tasks such as delivering mail or making breakfast for a pensioner.

"President Xi Jinping's government wants local industrial robotics makers such as E-Deodar, Anhui Efort Intelligent Equipment [Co, Ltd 安徽埃夫特智能装备有限公司], and Siasun Robot & Automation [Co, Ltd 上海新松机器人自动化有限公司] to take on foreign players such as Fanuc and California’s Adept Technology for leadership in the $11 billion global market.

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Responding to an aging population, and rising wages, Beijing is pushing investment in automatons
(b) The print version is about half as long as the online one. Also, in the bar chart showing "number of robots per 10,000 workers," the print (but not the online report) includes Taiwan (190 robots) and about 4 or 5 other countries).