Back in 2014 I was doing some exploratory number-crunching around potential investment themes. Often this can be like taking out a metal detector and finding a bottle top, but this time I noticed something I knew was significant.
I was reading about the growing capacity of robots and realised that the price, including depreciation, was converging with the full cost of labour doing a similar job, once you took into account pensions and healthcare costs. Over the following months, a theme I kept hearing in calls with CEOs was how they were deciding where to build their next factory. Simply putting it where suitable labour was cheapest was no longer sufficient. The boss of fashion retailer Gap joked in one call that the best choice to remain competitive would be to build the next factory on a boat and anchor it i...
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