The aging population in the US is something that shouldn’t be ignored. The wave of retirements of Baby Boomers during Covid has affected the job market as there are not enough people to replace them.
Our declining rate of population growth is certainly something we will be monitoring in the future. While there are economic tailwinds in the form of technology, the aging population could create headwinds.
There is a trend, however, where we may soon see the results of the intersection of these two factors:
Fewer Workers + Advancing Technology = Increased Robot Usage
The excerpt below from this businesswire.com article shows just how quickly robot sales are growing as companies seek to address employee shortages:
North American companies started the year by purchasing the most robots ever in a single quarter, with 11,595 robots sold at a value of $646 million. According to the Association for Advancing Automation, these Q1 numbers represent growth of 28% and 43% respectively over the first quarter of 2021 and 7% and 25% respectively over the previous best quarter, Q4 of 2021. Each industry segment experienced double-digit growth over the same quarter of 2021.
We see evidence of this trend here in Delaware as Christiana Care Health System is piloting a robot named Moxi to assist nurses with non-clinical tasks. Take a look at the article below for more on that:
I’ve also included an article below about Tesla’s humanoid robot named Optimus:
Our team at Wheeler financial will continue to keep an eye on this trend, and it will certainly factor into our investment decisions.
