Once it was hailed as the ultimate manufacturing industry, an enterprise that would cut American labor costs, boost productivity and rack up as much as $4 billion in sales by 1990. Blue-chip giants stampeded to buy into the action; bankers panted to finance the heralded expansion. Optimism was seemingly unbounded for the U.S. robotics industry, which produced semi-intelligent machines that were expected to help American businesses compete with low-wage foreign rivals over the next two decades and to improve greatly the quality of American industrial production.
Well, that was five years ago. Rather than becoming the highly successful purveyor of tireless, reliable welders, assemblers and heavy lifters for the auto industry, aerospace and other industrial concerns, robotics today is an industrial accident victim, crippled by a two-year slump. Sales of U.S. robots are expected to decline from an anemic $580 million in 1986 to about $400 million this year, miles below those rosy billion-dollar projections. The number of manufacturers that make robots and related equipment dropped from 328 last year to 300 this year.
Analysts had predicted that 250,000 robots would be in American factories by 1990; today only 25,000 are installed, roughly twice as many as exist in West Germany, which has a much smaller industrial base. The U.S. lags far behind Japan, where 118,800 robots are in use. Along with sluggish domestic demand, U.S. manufacturers face a shrinking share of the roughly $1.9 billion global robotics market. Reason: Japanese competitors have gained a strong edge in the field and appear likely to continue their domination. Says Michael Cronin, president of Automatix, a Massachusetts-based robotmaker that lost $7.8 million last year: "It's a bloodbath out there."
A symbolically significant retrenchment took place last month, when Westinghouse Electric sold off part of its money-losing Unimation robotics division. The buyer: Prab Robots, a small Michigan-based manufacturer of industrial robots and conveyor machines. Westinghouse's 1983 purchase of Unimation for $107 million marked Big Business's arrival in robotics; IBM, Bendix and General Electric soon followed. Unimation, founded in 1959, was a robotics pioneer. Its first product was an $18,000 Unimate machine used by General Motors to load forged dies at a New Jersey auto-assembly plant. As recently as 1981, Unimation made 45% of all robots sold in the U.S. Another setback for robotics will take place next month, when GE plans to fold its $4 million robotmaking plant in Plymouth, Fla., idling 118 workers.