The Robots are Coming—to Collaborate With You
Our future looks increasingly robotic—whether we like it or not. But the investment craze in robotics stocks may already be getting ahead of itself. The latest example: South Korea’s Doosan Robotics, whose shares nearly doubled in value on their first day of trading Thursday.
The company, which is part of the conglomerate Doosan Group, raised around $300 million from an initial public offering, making it Korea’s biggest IPO this year so far. Doosan makes collaborative robots, or cobots, designed to work together with humans on factory floors. Such robotic helpers are most suitable for smaller companies that may not be ready to automate their whole production line but use cobots to automate processes better done by machines.
Apart from its heavy-duty industrial robots, Doosan also makes variants that can serve coffee—and beer. Doosan isn’t the only robotics company looking frothy of late. Shares of its smaller peer Rainbow Robotics, which is backed by Samsung Electronics, have more than quadrupled this year.
Samsung raised its stake in Rainbow to 15% in March. To be fair, there are plenty of good reasons to be optimistic about industrial robots. Poor demographics and poisonous immigration politics in most advanced economies will mean weak labor-force growth in the future.
Robots rarely go on strike. And in the U.S., the enormous surge in manufacturing investment—courtesy of the Inflation Reduction Act and other industrial policy bills—means demand for manufacturing workers could remain strong for quite a while. Reshoring to advanced economies is another tailwind for robotics.
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