Running out of human workers? Better buy robots

Record high employment means that businesses are turning to automation – Merryn Somerset Webb asks Walter Price of the Allianz Technology Trust about the best ways to invest.

Horrible news for British strawberry lovers, says The Guardian: this year’s crop – which has started to ripen two weeks early, thanks to the good spring weather – may end up rotting on the ground. Why? A shortage of fruit-pickers. Growers across Europe are “competing for labour”. Demand is high everywhere (hence better deals on pay, bonuses and accommodation), but supply is falling fast: wages in Romania (where most EU fruit-pickers come from) have risen such that workers no longer make six times the local rate abroad, but more like three-and-a-half times. That rather changes the incentive – and the supply of strawberries.

Or so the story goes. But if the worriers were to look a little deeper into it, they might find that the picking panic is overdone. Enter Fieldwork Robotics, a spinout from the University of Plymouth, that has developed a fruit-picking robot (a “mechanical arm and hand that runs on wheels”, says The Times), which will apparently be able to pick 25,000 berries a day. Exciting stuff. But no surprise, I suspect, to Walter Price, manager of Allianz Technology Trust (LSE: ATT). Nothing, he says, drives spending on new technology more than a shortage of labour. Between 1948 and 1967, tech spending leapt from around 0.5% of US GDP to 1.5%. Between 1991 and 1999, it went from 2.9% to 4.7%. Now, as another shortage begins, it is rising again. It is currently at around 3.5%, says Price, and is forecast (by Fundstrat) to rise to 5.5% by 2050 as firms rush to invest in labour-replacing automation (Fundstrat suggests the US will see a shortfall of 8.2 million workers over the next decade alone).

Follow this logic and it makes sense that tech stocks should outperform in periods of labour shortage (as everyone rushes to buy their products), while firms that are “heavily reliant on labour to add value” lose out. Conveniently, that is exactly what the data shows.