{"id":"publication:1500002","publicationId":1500002,"storyId":1830001,"slug":"where-robots-could-bring-manufacturing-closer","canonicalUrl":"https://www.thelastdaily.com/article/where-robots-could-bring-manufacturing-closer","machineReadableUrl":"https://www.thelastdaily.com/api/public/articles/where-robots-could-bring-manufacturing-closer.json","headline":"Where Robots Could Bring Manufacturing Closer","dek":"Automation can strengthen the case for producing high-value goods nearer to customers, but apparel, energy costs and China’s industrial ecosystem set hard limits on any robot-led return.","bodyMarkdown":"On Sunday night, a French AI entrepreneur sketched a future in which the same humanoid worker could cost as much in Lorient as in Shenzhen — and production would flow back towards customers, cheap power and secure supply lines. Brivael Le Pogam, chief executive and chief technology officer of Paris-based AI video company Argil, made the case in an X post on October 11. The post turned Tesla’s Optimus into a symbol of an industrial reset: the moment, he wrote, when “intelligence gets a body.” The quotations in this article are The Last Daily’s translations from French.\n\n> “We will relocate, out of simple optimisation rather than patriotism,” Le Pogam wrote.\n\nThe argument has force because industrial robots already change where some work is done. But humanoids do not yet erase the advantages of Asia’s supplier networks, manufacturing scale and robot base. The first reshoring gains are more likely to come in predictable, high-value production than in the labour-heavy goods that became shorthand for offshoring.\n\n## The factories most likely to move first\n\nAutomotive components, electronics sub-assemblies, pharmaceutical packaging and food processing are plausible candidates where conventional robot arms, machine vision and automated handling can do much of the work in structured settings. These sectors benefit when manufacturers shorten delivery times, protect intellectual property or reduce exposure to a disrupted shipping route. They are also the industries already pulling robot investment.\n\nThe International Federation of Robotics recorded a new global high of 603,307 industrial-robot installations in 2025, driven by demand from electronics, automotive and general industry. The worldwide operational stock reached five million machines. Apparel makes the counterexample.\n\nSewing soft, shifting materials remains difficult to automate economically. Adidas closed its robot-led Speedfactories in Ansbach, Germany, and Atlanta in 2019, shifting the technology to Asian suppliers instead. The experiment showed that fast local production cannot compensate automatically for the dense manufacturing know-how around Asian footwear supply chains.\n\nFurniture sits between those poles. Norway’s Ekornes has long automated parts of its Stressless production — its corporate history records the installation of its 100th industrial robot and a sewing robot for chair covers — while retaining skilled assembly and finishing work. That is a more credible model for rich-country production: automation around a specialised product, rather than an empty factory run by general-purpose humanoids.\n\n## China is automating, too\n\nRobots can narrow a wage gap, but they do not travel alone. China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, nearly three out of every five deployed globally, according to the IFR. Chinese manufacturers accounted for 195,000 domestic installations.\n\nThat concentration gives Chinese factories experience, integrators and component suppliers precisely as Western companies contemplate robot-led reshoring. The trade data are a warning against treating automation as a shortcut to relocation. Kearney’s 2026 Reshoring Index found US imports from 14 Asian low-cost manufacturing economies rose $60bn in 2025 while domestic manufactured output edged down.\n\nComputer and electronics imports, along with apparel, continued to grow faster than US output, even as several other categories showed early signs of coming closer to home. There are real investments behind the rhetoric. The Reshoring Initiative counted 244,000 US manufacturing jobs announced through reshoring and foreign direct investment in 2024, with high- and medium-high-technology sectors driving most of them.\n\nAnnouncements, however, are not the same as capacity that is built, staffed and producing at scale. For Europe, electricity complicates Le Pogam’s proposition that energy will become decisive. The International Energy Agency says EU power prices for energy-intensive industry averaged more than twice US levels in 2025 and nearly 50% above China’s.\n\nNordic power can be an exception, but it does not remove the continent-wide problem for batteries, metals and other electricity-hungry plants.\n\n## Norway’s opening — and the humanoid test Norway has assets for a narrower version of the vision: renewable electricity, advanced maritime and defence engineering, and manufacturers accustomed to high wages. 1X has developed robot assembly and actuator manufacturing beside its Moss campus, though its current NEO offering is aimed at homes. Its own product information says complex chores may still require remote supervision by a 1X expert — a useful reminder that a humanoid body is not yet equivalent to independent factory labour. Tesla remains the headline test. Elon Musk said at Davos in January that public Optimus sales could begin by the end of 2027 if the machines became capable and safe enough. A September report by The Information, relayed by Electrek, said Fremont was building several hundred a week for largely internal use; Tesla has not published a build count.\n\n> “Deployable dexterity will remain pathetic compared to human hands beyond 2036,” Rodney Brooks, the iRobot co-founder, wrote in a January 2026 forecast. That prediction may prove too pessimistic. Yet the near-term measure is less cinematic: intervention rates, uptime, safety and cost per useful task.","bodyHtml":"

On Sunday night, a French AI entrepreneur sketched a future in which the same humanoid worker could cost as much in Lorient as in Shenzhen — and production would flow back towards customers, cheap power and secure supply lines. Brivael Le Pogam, chief executive and chief technology officer of Paris-based AI video company Argil, made the case in an X post on October 11. The post turned Tesla’s Optimus into a symbol of an industrial reset: the moment, he wrote, when “intelligence gets a body.” The quotations in this article are The Last Daily’s translations from French.

\n
“We will relocate, out of simple optimisation rather than patriotism,” Le Pogam wrote.
\n

The argument has force because industrial robots already change where some work is done. But humanoids do not yet erase the advantages of Asia’s supplier networks, manufacturing scale and robot base. The first reshoring gains are more likely to come in predictable, high-value production than in the labour-heavy goods that became shorthand for offshoring.

\n

The factories most likely to move first

\n

Automotive components, electronics sub-assemblies, pharmaceutical packaging and food processing are plausible candidates where conventional robot arms, machine vision and automated handling can do much of the work in structured settings. These sectors benefit when manufacturers shorten delivery times, protect intellectual property or reduce exposure to a disrupted shipping route. They are also the industries already pulling robot investment.

\n

The International Federation of Robotics recorded a new global high of 603,307 industrial-robot installations in 2025, driven by demand from electronics, automotive and general industry. The worldwide operational stock reached five million machines. Apparel makes the counterexample.

\n

Sewing soft, shifting materials remains difficult to automate economically. Adidas closed its robot-led Speedfactories in Ansbach, Germany, and Atlanta in 2019, shifting the technology to Asian suppliers instead. The experiment showed that fast local production cannot compensate automatically for the dense manufacturing know-how around Asian footwear supply chains.

\n

Furniture sits between those poles. Norway’s Ekornes has long automated parts of its Stressless production — its corporate history records the installation of its 100th industrial robot and a sewing robot for chair covers — while retaining skilled assembly and finishing work. That is a more credible model for rich-country production: automation around a specialised product, rather than an empty factory run by general-purpose humanoids.

\n

China is automating, too

\n

Robots can narrow a wage gap, but they do not travel alone. China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, nearly three out of every five deployed globally, according to the IFR. Chinese manufacturers accounted for 195,000 domestic installations.

\n

That concentration gives Chinese factories experience, integrators and component suppliers precisely as Western companies contemplate robot-led reshoring. The trade data are a warning against treating automation as a shortcut to relocation. Kearney’s 2026 Reshoring Index found US imports from 14 Asian low-cost manufacturing economies rose $60bn in 2025 while domestic manufactured output edged down.

\n

Computer and electronics imports, along with apparel, continued to grow faster than US output, even as several other categories showed early signs of coming closer to home. There are real investments behind the rhetoric. The Reshoring Initiative counted 244,000 US manufacturing jobs announced through reshoring and foreign direct investment in 2024, with high- and medium-high-technology sectors driving most of them.

\n

Announcements, however, are not the same as capacity that is built, staffed and producing at scale. For Europe, electricity complicates Le Pogam’s proposition that energy will become decisive. The International Energy Agency says EU power prices for energy-intensive industry averaged more than twice US levels in 2025 and nearly 50% above China’s.

\n

Nordic power can be an exception, but it does not remove the continent-wide problem for batteries, metals and other electricity-hungry plants.

\n

Norway’s opening — and the humanoid test Norway has assets for a narrower version of the vision: renewable electricity, advanced maritime and defence engineering, and manufacturers accustomed to high wages. 1X has developed robot assembly and actuator manufacturing beside its Moss campus, though its current NEO offering is aimed at homes. Its own product information says complex chores may still require remote supervision by a 1X expert — a useful reminder that a humanoid body is not yet equivalent to independent factory labour. Tesla remains the headline test. Elon Musk said at Davos in January that public Optimus sales could begin by the end of 2027 if the machines became capable and safe enough. A September report by The Information, relayed by Electrek, said Fremont was building several hundred a week for largely internal use; Tesla has not published a build count.

\n
“Deployable dexterity will remain pathetic compared to human hands beyond 2036,” Rodney Brooks, the iRobot co-founder, wrote in a January 2026 forecast. That prediction may prove too pessimistic. Yet the near-term measure is less cinematic: intervention rates, uptime, safety and cost per useful task.
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