The pressure of managing younger generation of Chinese workers has prompted Taiwanese company Foxconn, which makes iPads and iPhones as well as a range of products for Dell, Sony and Hewlett-Packard, and has 1.2 million employees, is planning quicker moves to replace human workforce with robots.

As early as August, Foxconn said it would continue to cut overtime to less than nine hours a week from the current 20. This means one-third fewer hours for the hundreds of thousands of Foxconn workers across China.

The wave of suicides had wider implications in the area, with a number of factories reporting employees getting up on the roof and threatening to jump unless they were given increased wages.

Besides the payment demand, those younger works claim more for rights and human-based management, as showed in the recent riot in Foxconn's Taiyuan plant.

Nevertheless, Foxconn has also started focusing more on automation. Last year Foxconn’s owner, Taiwan tycoon Terry Gou, set up an automation robotics division and hired engineers to design and repair the cybernetic workers.

Gou said the move to automate was more about helping its employees move up the value chain, away from basic manufacturing work.

The ambitious plan does not go well as current robots are only capable of simple, repetitive work, says 21st Century Business Herald.

Massive employment of robots is expected to come in 2014, the report said.