When Terry Gou, founder and chief executive of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, announced on Friday that the group would drastically increase the use of robots in its manufacturing process, that was supposed to be good news. At least investors are set to like the idea of containing production cost. And the message Gou meant to get across was also that young workers would no longer be forced to do exceedingly boring and repetitive jobs.

But it didn’t come out right. Gou used a speech in front of 20,000 of his employees at a dance party last Friday to announce that Foxconn (2354:TAI) would be using 1m robots three years from now – matching the group’s total China headcount – which would replace workers in some jobs.

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