South Korea has more than 1,000 robots for every 10,000 factory workers, the densest on earth.

South Korea
1,012
Singapore
770
China
470
Germany
429
Japan
419
United States
295

Industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, 2023. The global average is 162.

Why this is happening

South Korea built its wealth on a few export champions in chips, cars and shipbuilding, where production lines are huge and standardised, exactly the work robots do best.
Korean firms make many of the robots themselves, so installing them at home is cheaper than for rivals who import.
A shrinking, ageing workforce gives Korean factories a hard reason to replace hands with arms.

The take

Automation is not spreading evenly, it is pooling. A handful of countries are pulling decades ahead on the factory floor, and the gap with everyone else is widening, not closing.

Source: International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2024