Automation 'can improve safety'

Labor-intensive industries are replacing people with robots to raise efficiency

If some of the workshops had been upgraded with totally automated assembly lines or robots, the blast that killed 75 people at Kunshan Zhongrong Metal Products in East China's Jiangsu province would never had happened, according to Zhou Jianghua, sales manager at Kawasaki Robotics (Tianjin) Co Ltd Shanghai branch.

Kawasaki is a leading industrial robots provider from Japan with customers mainly from the auto industry, such as Toyota.