Robots will replace 700,000 delivery workers ‘sooner or later’, warns JD.com boss - Financial Times

Robots will replace 700,000 delivery workers ‘sooner or later’, warns JD.com boss

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Robots will replace 700,000 delivery workers ‘sooner or later’, warns JD.com boss

China’s rapid adoption of technology threatens millions of gig-economy jobs, policymakers fear

!Richard Liu speaks in front of a large JD.com logo on a screen.

*Richard Liu: ‘It will definitely be robots delivering parcels. But I really do not want our 700,000 brothers to go without meals, without jobs’

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Joe Leahy in Beijing

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The head of one of China’s biggest ecommerce groups has warned that its 700,000 delivery workers will be replaced by robots “sooner or later”, underlining the threat from rapid automation to the country’s already strained employment market.

Richard Liu, founder and chair of JD.com, said the company had signed contracts with about 120 schools to retrain its army of couriers for new work such as repairing and maintaining robots.

“In the future, when robots are delivering parcels, sooner or later, there will be a day when couriers are basically no longer needed,” Liu told the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO forum in Beijing on Sunday. “It will definitely be robots delivering parcels. But I really do not want our 700,000 brothers to go without meals, without jobs.”

Lui did not forecast when robot deliveries would become widespread in China. However, a number of pilot projects are under way, including airport food delivery robots in Shenzhen that take meals to passengers at gates and others that can ride commuter trains in Shenzhen to restock convenience stores, Chinese media have reported.

The comments tap into growing concern among policymakers that China’s rapid adoption of robots is threatening the jobs of the economy’s most vulnerable workers.

The number of “gig workers” in China — temporary employees doing mostly blue-collar jobs such as factory work, ride-hailing drivers or deliveries — will reach 320mn this year compared with 200mn five years ago, according to the China New Employment Forms Research Center. Gig workers make up about 40 per cent of all urban employment in China.

The threat to blue-collar jobs from robots — and to white-collar positions from AI — comes as the government reported youth unemployment at 16.3 per cent in April.

Liu said robot repair jobs would become common “because robots are machinery . . . they will always, at some point, have faults”.

He said technology should “make human life become better” and work “more interesting”, rather than “take away human beings’ right to work”.

Beijing prioritised frontier technologies such as robotics in its next five-year plan, its flagship policy document that was officially approved in March.