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Warehouse Automation

E-commerce and retail giants such as Amazon and Walmart maintain vast networks of warehouses for inventory distribution and supply chain management. While automation is embraced as much as possible, there is still much inefficiency in the human element of these warehouses. For Amazon specifically, humans retrieve items and put them in baskets in order to ship the products out. They make the process as efficient as possible for what it is, but the ultimate goal would be complete automation. The same is true of the human element in other distribution warehouses. In order to maintain the lowest cost, automation will need to replace humans.

Amazon is in fact already taking the automation in-house with the acquisition of Kiva, which makes automated transportation robots. When Kiva was bought buy Amazon in 2012 they essentially monopolized the warehouse robot industry and refused to sell to competitors. As such, the rest of the industry is still trying to catch up and replicate Kiva's features.  Many companies trying to replace Kiva are not public companies, but rather in the early startup phase. Due to these factors, it is difficult to find a pure play warehouse robotics company that trades publicly. Yaskawa Electric (YASKY) is one such name that can give exposure to the robotics industry as a whole. Yaskawa designs and builds robots for industrial manufacturing along with robots with applications in warehouses. They currently build a packaging robot that could be embraced by the warehouse industry, representing a significant growth opportunity.


The trend towards automation is far from over, and in the warehouse business it is still in its infant stages. The industry is waiting on innovation and a better solution with warehouse operators ready to jump on the latest and greatest technology when it becomes available. 

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