James Kynge

People talking about moving into cramped apartments.

They couldn't afford borrowing huge amounts of money to buy those apartments, having to repay the debt on that for decades to come.

And then the grandparents move into the cramped apartment and then the child arrives and it's really stressful.

And then they have to work, you know, nine in the morning till nine in the evening in really high pressure jobs and then put their kids into childcare.

And then the cost of the childcare is so huge.

It really sounded, you know, a stressful situation.

And many of the colleagues and friends I had that were around that age, um, they were just sort of either trying to move to America or, or somewhere in Europe, or they were just saying, you know, this is just too much.

I think we'll move to an outlying city where the pace is slower.

We can afford cheaper accommodation and, uh,

we'll move out of the fast lane of the big cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Well, I tried to choose one that is related, although tangentially, to the population issue.

Of course, as China, well, I'm not going to say runs out of people, but as the number of Chinese people declines, and as the number of people who are willing to do labor in factories also declines, I think Chinese factory robots...

this year will exceed a market share domestically that's inside China of 60%.

That compares to last year, 57%.

It may not sound like a huge increase, but we're talking about market share that Chinese

factory robot makers are taking away from foreign brands such as Fanuc, ABB, Yasukawa, etc.

And I also think that Chinese exports of factory robots this year will grow at around 60% again.

That's a growth rate compared to last year.

By the way, these factory robots, we're not talking about humanoid robots.

These are really production line robots.