The robots aren’t going replace humans anytime soon. Or that’s what one hopes.

Michael Tam, chief brand officer at Shenzhen-based UBTech, which has partnerships with carmaker BYD and Apple contractor Foxconn, said its Walker S2 robots were 30 to 50 per cent as productive as humans and only in certain tasks such as stacking boxes and quality control.

Yet manufacturers are still racing to order them to avoid losing out to competitors, Tam told the FT. “You can imagine … if Tesla has the advantage of deploying their own human robots into the manufacturing line, that means maybe BYD, they are staying behind.”