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 Shenzhen 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.”