Chinese robot waiters have become popular among Korean restaurateurs experiencing a labor shortage.
According to the Financial Times (FT), South Korea’s local robotics firms are less enthused about autonomous servers.
According to the poll, restaurant owners are having problems recruiting personnel as wages grow. Following the outbreak, several consumers have expressed a need for touchless service.
“I don’t have to worry about hiring people anymore,” said Seoul restaurateur Kwon Hyang-jin in an interview with the Financial Times. “It never gets sick, and it never complains about its workload.”
Executives claim that country-neutral government programs aimed at promoting robotics adoption are damaging South Korea’s domestic robot market.
“We are concerned that low-cost Chinese robots are dominating our market because it is difficult to compete on price,” a prominent domestic robot distributor executive stated. “We’re working hard to overcome our price disadvantage with higher-quality robots, but it’s not going to be easy.”
Last year, there were 5,000 robot servers in Korean restaurants, a 67% increase from 2021, with 70% of them coming from China.
