Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn is aiming to fully automate its factories, said Dai Jia-peng, general manager of the company's automation committee.

According to DigiTimes, Dai will oversee the process in a three-phase plan to automate operations at Foxconn's Chinese factories using software and in-house robotics units, known as Foxbots.

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The three phases are as follows:

1. The first phase of the automation plan involves replacing the dangerous or repetitive work humans are unwilling to do.
   

2. The second phase, with an aim to improve efficiency, involves streamlining production lines to reduce the number of excess robots in use.
   

3. The third phase involves automating entire factories with only a minimal number of workers assigned for production, logistics, testing, and inspection processes.
   

The company has been working on automating its factories for years. Only last year, it set a benchmark of 30 percent automation by 2020. The company has the ability to produce around 10,000 Foxbots a year. In March, Foxconn said it had automated 60,000 jobs at one of its factories.

Although human workers are far cheaper than robots and it is also difficult and time consuming to program robots to perform multiple tasks or tasks that are outside their original function, the company believes that in the long term, robots will prove cheaper than human labor.

The Chinese government, however, has incentivized employment in the country by, for instance, doling out billions of dollars in bonuses, energy contracts, and public infrastructure to companies like Foxconn to expand. As of last year, Foxconn employed as many as 1.2 million people, making it one of the largest employers in the world.

According to the Verge, there is, however, a central side effect to automation that would specifically benefit a company like Foxconn. The manufacturer has been worried about claims of abysmal worker conditions and a high rate of employee suicide, so much so that the company had to install suicide netting at factories throughout China to protect itself against employee litigation. Therefore, the company believes that automation would really help it in avoiding such issues.