'People still want to work here': can British business survive Brexit?

Towards the end of a production line deep inside a factory near Cardiff, two workers are almost halfway through their 120-hour shift. The grey and white ABB YuMi robots have torsos, shoulders, elbows and hands, and the physiques of heavyweight boxers. They have most weekends off, but when demand peaks, as it often does these days, they can work without pause, as human shifts come and go around them.

Hunched side by side over a conveyor belt, the robots pluck USB ports from small plastic palettes. With barely a whir, they move them to a second conveyor before pushing them into pinprick holes in green circuit boards. The parts will allow consumers to connect to and program the Raspberry Pi, Britain’s most popular – and smallest – computer. In the past five years, 10m of these credit card-sized PCs have been made here, in an old television factory in South Wales.

On the Raspberry Pi production line.

A third YuMi in the row is motionless and missing its hands. Engineers are adapting new grippers to allow it to attach a connector called a GPIO, which can link the Pi to other devices. In the meantime, a young technician called Lauren Yarde does the job. Wearing a white coat, the 20-year-old sits in line beside her headless colleagues, fixing the parts to the circuit boards. “I never thought I’d be working with robots,” she says, as computers slide between artificial and human hands. Does she feel part of a team? “Well, they can’t argue with you,” she says, smiling.

The “collaborative” robots, or “cobots”, are part of a new chapter in an unlikely British manufacturing success story. Sony arrived here in the mid-1970s, bringing jobs and hi-tech hope to a region built on coal and steel. At its peak in the 1990s, this factory, and its now shuttered sister site near Bridgend, employed more than 4,000 people and made 15,000 televisions a day. But in 2005, the flat screen shattered the cathode ray tube, and Sony moved its TV production to eastern Europe and Asia. Hundreds of workers lost their jobs.

Gareth Jones was among the survivors, and has worked under this roof for 30 years. The son of a Swansea steelworker now manages 500 employees, a number still growing despite the recent robot recruitment. Yarde will get work elsewhere in the factory, he says, because automation is helping Sony create more business, which means more jobs, most of which require human hands.

Occupying half its original site outside Pencoed, an old