From sushi robots to farm drones: Japan Inc. innovation thwarts BOJ's efforts
17/06/2019 13:02
(Fixes links to related content)
By Kaori Kaneko
TOKYO, June 17 (Reuters) -
PASTRY SCANNER: A worker at the Andersen bakery outlet at Ueno
station in Tokyo uses a checkout scanner to calculate the price
of pastries. REUTERS/Kaori Kaneko
Bakeries in Japan deploy cash registers that ring up pastries by
reading their shape and color, construction robots scurry to lay
out the next day's building materials in the dead of night and
machines churn out sushi rice balls.
These innovations are helping companies navigate the
nation's tightest labor market since the 1970s and minimize wage
increases. That's frustrating the Bank of Japan, which is
struggling to understand why years of moderate economic growth
has not translated into higher inflation.
The central bank has argued that stubbornly low inflation
will eventually accelerate as demand increasingly outstrips
supply in the economy. As growth picks up, the bank says, sales
will increase, companies will raise wages, consumers will spend
and prices will rise in a self-sustaining cycle.
While Kuroda has praised labor-saving innovations, the BOJ's
failure to get close to its 2% price target in six years is
forcing a rethink. Even with the jobless rate at the lowest
since the early 1990s, businesses have wrung more value out of
their workforce while wage growth has been subdued.
The average worker added $68,000 of value to the economy in
the 2017-18 fiscal year, the last year for which data is
available, up 11% over five years. For the same period,
inflation-adjusted wages fell 3.8%.
A bakery situated in Tokyo's busy Ueno district is
instructive. The outlet, operated by bakery chain Andersen,
looks like any other, its glass walls luring pedestrians with
displays of baguettes, croissants and sweet pastries. But
instead of ringing the treats up by hand at the register, an
employee places the order below a scanner that recognizes the
items by shape and color, and rings them up automatically.
With the BakeryScan machine, the outlet halved the number of
cash registers and the time it took to process purchases,
according to the company.
"It's innovative and great," said Junko Kuroda, a
68-year-old housewife, who marveled at the shopping experience.
"Things are quicker this way."
On construction sites, Shimizu Corp's Robo-Carrier delivers
construction supplies overnight to the proper spots for the next
day's job, saving workers time hauling the materials in the
morning. Other robots work during the daytime welding or
installing ceilings.
For now, Shimizu 1803.T estimates the labor savings are
just 1.1%. But the company expects the impact of the robots to
rise as it expands the range of tasks they perform.
Robots can do sushi, too.
Suzumo Machinery Co. 6405.T makes robots that can churn
out 4,800 rice balls an hour and others that plop rice into
bowls, measured to the gram. This cuts costs by reducing waste
involved with dishing out the rice by hand.
Shutoko Engineering Co., which inspects the hundreds of
kilometers of toll highways in and around Japan's capital, is
conducting feasibility tests on whether vehicle-installed 8K
cameras, which take 33 million-pixel images, could inspect the
walls and ceilings of tunnels for cracks. And Japan's farmers,
rapidly aging and facing a flight of their children to big
cities, are experimenting with drones to analyze rice stalks,
gauge how much pesticide and fertilizer the plants need and
spray the crops.
BOJ Deputy Governor Masayoshi Amamiya has said that such
"enthusiastic" labor-saving efforts have helped keep his bank's
2% inflation target out of reach. "The large room to raise
productivity and the technological progress in recent years have
allowed firms to constrain price rises as much as possible," he
said last August.
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(Reporting by Kaori Kaneko. Edited by William Mallard and Peter
Hirschberg.)
((kaori.kaneko@thomsonreuters.com))