After 5 years, 20% of Nike and Adidas sneakers will be made by robots.

The approach they take is to use smart robots to produce sports shoes. Adidas opened its first Speed ​​Factory in Germany in December 2015 and began using smart technology to make shoes. In 2017, the second fast factory was also opened in Atlanta.

Perhaps this is not news, but according to the Wall Street Journal, Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, recently expects nearly 20% of Nike and Adidas footwear production to be transferred to automation in 2023. High factory. Speeding up the supply chain will help these sports brands keep up with what the industry calls “fast fashion” consumer demand.

This means that the production cycle and business model of the sports shoe market will be changed.

In April 2017, Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted said in an interview with Chinese media that the current capacity of the Atlanta Express Plant is about 1 million pairs a year, just like the fast factory in Germany. “The goal of investing in such a fast factory is to develop better technology and apply this advanced technology to our current production,” he said.

Rorsted believes that, at least for the moment, what the two factories are doing has not brought much change to the entire industry. "We want to be able to do a 3D scan of your feet so that you can know the shape of your feet and then make a 3D model based on the results of this scan, so that the production of the shoes is completely tailored to your foot type." Kasper Rorsted said, "A market like this actually has a small share of the entire market."

In April 2017, Adidas announced that there will be 5,000 pairs of Futurecraft 4D running shoes with a 3D printed midsole that will be available for sale in the fall and winter of 2017. At least for now, the scale of the 5,000 pairs relative to the output of other factories is very small.

But the caution of Kasper Rorsted does not mean that such a smart factory will not make a difference in the sports shoe industry.

According to Morgan Stanley's report, suppliers that have been traditionally produced over the next five years will still maintain 90% of the industry's total production. But five years later, smart factories will gradually become mainstream, and big brands and competitors will gradually grab the business of traditional suppliers.