Nike Will Gradually Make Radical Adjustments To Key Markets.

In 2013,

Become the first batch of Grabit customers in the US industrial automation start-ups.

Now, four years later, this cooperation has entered a substantive stage.

According to the world clothing and shoe net, in August of this year, Grabit began offering several units to Nike factory.

These robots are 20 times more efficient than manual ones, and a machine monitored by an employee can produce as many as 600 pairs of shoes per day.

By the end of this year, more than ten equipment will be put into operation in factories in China and Mexico.

Grabit robotics was first derived from SRI, a well-known non-profit research institute in Menlo Park, California.

In 2013, Grabit became a new company independently. Its core technology is to study the use of electrostatic adsorption to control machines.

At the beginning of its founding, Grabit received $25 million in financing. In addition to the sports giant Nike, investors also included Flex, an electronics manufacturer.

Producers Esquel and Korea Samsung Corp.

Nike has said that the most complicated process in the manufacture of athletic shoes is the combination of shoe upper. It consists of up to 40 pieces of material heated and fused. After processing, there is no obvious sewing mark. Because this work is more than manual control, the shoe making process has been done by hand.

Today, robots will completely replace this task.

Grabit's vamp assembly machine looks like a super large sandwich machine. It is learned that it can automatically display the best stacking mode of shoe upper material and fold it up.

Subsequently, the platform with an electrostatic adsorption plate descends and takes away the material. It moves to the upper part of a semi-finished shoe and withdraws the electric field, placing the shoes in the correct configuration and sending them into the hot press.

Generally speaking, manual speed can take 10 to 20 minutes to complete the above process, while robots only need 50 to 75 seconds.

8 hours a day, the machine can complete 300 to 600 pairs of vamp.

However, this does not mean complete mechanical work. Each machine still needs an employee to supervise and control.

In fact, in the field of sports equipment, the use of intelligent robots to produce sports shoes is not new.

In December 2015, Adidas opened its first home intelligent concept factory, SpeedFactory, in Germany, using machines instead of manual manufacturing to reduce production costs.

This year, Adidas plans to open second in Atlanta, and the next one will be western Europe.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley expects that in 2023, Nike and Adidas will have up to 20% of their shoes and will be produced through higher automation processes.

As Nike has made substantial progress in intelligent manufacturing and production, it will no longer be highly restricted by the cost of artificial manufacturing. This will enable sports giants to move factories to large core consumer markets such as Europe and the United States.

In June, Nike announced a global restructuring plan to reduce its workforce of about 2%, and simplify its regional structure. In the future, it will focus on 12 major cities, including New York, London, Shanghai, Beijing, Losangeles, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, Barcelona, Seoul and Milan in the past 1400 years.

In order to get close to these key consumer markets and save channel costs, Nike intends to move its factories to areas close to Europe and the United States. Previously, the US brand set up an advanced production technology R & D department in Oregon, which is a big signal.

At the same time, China and Mexico City, which have huge consumption potential, are also valued by Nike. By the end of 2017, more than ten robot production facilities will be placed in China and Mexico.

At present, Nike has about 591 factories in the global region, up to about 1000000 workers, mainly concentrated in the cheap labor areas in Asia.

After the upgrading of the automated production process, Nike and Adidas will probably change the global structure of the footwear industry.

It is also noteworthy that, as part of the global restructuring plan, Nike began to streamline its business in India in September 5th, and has cut about 20% of its employees.

Data show that sales of US brands in India dropped to 7 billion 640 million rupees from 8 billion 30 million rupees last year, and business losses expanded from 1 billion 10 million rupees in fiscal 2015 to 1 billion 700 million rupees in fiscal year 2016.

It can be seen that in order to cope with the strong pursuit of competitors, the sports giant brand has gradually made a thorough adjustment in the production process, employees and key markets.

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