
U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s - prostoalex
http://fortune.com/2015/06/26/fracking-manufacturing-costs/
======
bobjordan
Shenzhen China factory owner here.

The costs are definitely rising in China for English speaking technical labor
such as the engineers we need. We compete with companies like Apple and all
the other foreign companies rushing to China these days to keep them employed.
But we are still talking much lower salaries overall, for example, $30,000
USD/year for a degreed Sr. Electrical design engineer with 20 years
experience.

Regarding rents, the Shenzhen central business section rents are expensive now
and cost/sqft comparable to anywhere else. However, good industrial space is
still far cheaper, for example, I just leased an additional 12,000 sqft high
quality assembly space with low ESD floors in a technical park along with 8
dorm rooms to sleep up to 32 people (4 per room - last owner had 8 per room).
Lease on this new space cost me $3500 per month. There is also a kitchen ran
by the tech park where they serve 3 hot buffet style meals per day for
$2/day/worker. I'm not aware of anyplace in USA where you can lease a space
like this for $0.29 per square foot nor get a buffet meal for $0.66 cents nor
have door rooms for workers. Now, it is competitive to find this space and you
need to lease when you find it not wait 1 day, it took us 4 months searching
and we lost several spaces waiting 1-2 days, but it exists.

But ultimately what is far cheaper here in China and the main reason I must
remain here to make money is for the lower cost of the materials required to
actually build the products.

There is a critical mass of suppliers here where you can find half dozen
capable suppliers for nearly anything you'd need to buy. For example we do a
lot of custom molded plastic parts and many times I can make multiple cavity
hard (300K shot life) injection mold tools for plastics for $3K-$5K USD and it
would cost 5x or even 10x as much to buy them in USA. No less, bolts, nuts,
screws, electronics all vastly cheaper here.

Lastly, as someone else noted, the cost of shipping is much cheaper when you
originate your shipping quotes from a Chinese account, especially for air
shipping to USA, rates originating from my China company's Fedex account is
routinely 50% cheaper than what Fedex quotes in the USA. This really adds up
when you need to ship stuff around the world quickly.

~~~
tptacek
How did you end up owning a factory in Shenzhen?

~~~
CamperBob2
I wondered the same thing. His linkedin page (in his profile) is pretty
interesting. I'd like to hear his thoughts on some of the IP-theft topics
being brought up elsewhere in the thread...

------
unquietcode
There are health and environmental costs to fracking which are not being
adequately addressed, and which are unsurprisingly ignored by this article.
China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but
there are consequences to this. Some of their cities are today near
uninhabitable, some are just unbearably smoggy. We definitely do not want to
pat ourselves on the back for an economic boom that scars our country's land
and water resources and affects the air water of countless individuals
(citizens!). If we're going to build our economy on fracking, it should be
heavily regulated. No entity should have the right to pump unknown chemicals
into the ground with impunity and without oversight. And even with oversight--
BP Horizon and every other avoidable oil disaster of the last 10 years.

~~~
megablast
> China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but
> there are consequences to this.

No different to anywhere else in the world, just that it happened more
recently.

~~~
brianwawok
Source?

I am honestly curious. I know for example that the US was very dirty in the
early 1900s, but we had 100 million people. If China was dirty in the 2000s
with 1.3 billion people, it stands to reason that China was more dirty, no?

~~~
superiortoyou
Surely it's the opposite. China pollutes far less per capita than the US.

~~~
pyre
Less per capita can still work out to more in absolute terms.

------
sien
This has been predicted for a while. This has been said as early as 2010 and
possibly even before that by about 2015 costs would equalize. In 2013 there
was an article in The Economist on this:

[http://www.economist.com/news/special-
report/21569570-growin...](http://www.economist.com/news/special-
report/21569570-growing-number-american-companies-are-moving-their-
manufacturing-back-united)

Here is a key quote from the article:

"BCG used to argue that companies unwilling to send their manufacturing to
lower-cost countries were putting their very future in jeopardy. Now it says
that companies will bring manufacturing back to America from China. As soon as
2015, says Hal Sirkin, a consultant at the firm, it will cost about the same
to manufacture goods for the American market in certain parts of America as in
China in many industries, including computers and electronics, machinery,
appliances, electrical equipment and furniture. That calculation takes into
account a wide variety of direct costs, including labour, property and
transport, as well as indirect ones such as supply-chain risk."

Also worth noting is that the US is often a bigger market for some goods.

But it's also worth noting that German and Japanese manufacturing has been
more expensive that US manufacturing for decades and still in some areas
Germany and Japan do very well.

It's interesting to see an article that puts fracking up as the key reason.
Energy costs are not irrelevant but are also often not a big part of the cost.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I was going to mention this as well, thanks for finding the economist article.
Manufacturing costs are more than just the price of parts, sending people to
and from the factory several times, communicating requirements, Dealing with
tariffs and customs. For smaller runs it is definitely getting competitive in
the US, but so far the parts suppliers haven't yet picked up on this. I'm
expecting a midwest town or two with good air/rail transport to figure this
out and start a mini-manufacturing boomlet. Will be interesting to see.

~~~
patrickk
Also quality issues. If you want the absolute best industrial
part/tool/whatever on the market, often you go to a mid sized German company
no one has heard of and get it there.

Strong apprenticeships and unions (meaning very high quality, loyal workers
therefore low turnover) and an obsession with quality can all be important
advantages in the competition with China:

[http://www.economist.com/news/business/21606834-many-
countri...](http://www.economist.com/news/business/21606834-many-countries-
want-mittelstand-germanys-it-not-so-easy-copy-german-lessons)

------
Azerb
I work in the consumer device space and from what I've seen, the flexibility
of in-region supply chain for components and sub-assemblies would be very
difficult to match outside of China. It allows for JIT manufacturing and
incredibly quick divergences from POR during development when issues occur.

However for more durable goods I could definitely see a resurgence in US
manufacturing with the right investments were made in extensive semi to full
automation on the design/factory side. China factories are in a tough spot in
the regard since employing more people is encouraged by the government, but
automation eats away at the low end positions. See Foxconn's 1 Million+
employee count [1] and recently announced slowdown of automation take over
[2].

[1]
[http://www.foxconn.com/Files/annual_rpt_e/2014_annual_rpt_e....](http://www.foxconn.com/Files/annual_rpt_e/2014_annual_rpt_e.pdf)

[2][http://www.computerworld.com/article/2941272/emerging-
techno...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2941272/emerging-
technology/foxconns-ceo-backpedals-on-robot-takeover-at-factories.html)

------
rjdagost
For some industries the USA is and has for some time been a bit lower cost for
manufacturing than China. Labor costs are only part of the equation- you also
have to take into account transportation costs, energy costs, costs of
obtaining capital, etc. all weighed against political, scheduling, and quality
risks. For my own industry (specialty machine vision systems) outsourcing to
China is almost not worth the trouble.

~~~
SiVal
You left out the biggest cost of all: technology theft. The Chinese government
wants its manufacturers to watch for technologies that could be of economic or
military value and to pass them on to relevant Chinese organizations for use.
When the local Party leader's son starts producing your "specialty machine
vision systems" in his factory down the road, are you going to go to the
Party-controlled court and sue him?

If I had a "technology" that was immediately discernible by any buyer (a
plastic cup, a game board with an image printed on paper and glued to
cardboard), I might make it in China, but for any non-obvious technology, I
would assume that any money I saved on COST by making it in China, I would
lose on PRICE when my manufacturer's brother-in-law started competing with me.

~~~
mistermann
> You left out the biggest cost of all: technology theft.

Or plain old fashioned outright theft. I did business for a few years with a
Chinese supplier, the contact was made from a (local Chinese) reliable friend
of many years who did international business so had contacts. After two years
of a pretty seamless business relationship, one day the supplier decided to
simply disappear with the $45k deposit on an order.

~~~
icelancer
We are pretty sure that a previous supplier of ours was running their machines
on a competitor's (of mine) dime and billing them for materials/goods and
burying it in the sales sheets, while shipping us the product that was near-
identical to theirs but with our logos and branding on it.

I understand this is fairly common when making knockoff goods, too.

------
paddlepop
Sadly this doesn't address the reason I import from China and not from the USA
- where the product is likely to be of better quality - the cost of shipping.
I just recently had to cancel a large order from our first USA wholesaler when
we discovered that the cost to ship via DHL or FedEx would cost 500% more than
the value of the items themselves. This maybe a New Zealand problem but often
shipping from China is free despite the distances being the same

~~~
pjc50
Export post from China is heavily subsidised.

~~~
kristofferR
Mostly by the postal services in the recipient country actually:

"If you buy the cheap goods from abroad today, you can often get them shipped
"free" around half the planet and to your home. It may be cheaper to order a
remote control with batteries from China and throw the remote away, rather
than going to the store and buying a pack of batteries.

That this may be a problem for local businesses is obvious, but the reason you
can order extremely cheap goods from China is far more complicated than you
think. Most countries in the world have actually joined forces in an
international collaboration to allocate freight costs between themselves a
partnership, where the importing countries eventually ended up holding the
bag.

This agreement is called Universal Postal Convention, and it's important for
many of us in everyday life. It is quite simple to regulate mail traffic
between all the countries that have joined, not to mention how much it will
cost to ship the item. The intention behind the agreement was good when it was
introduced, but over a hundred years later, the social conditions changed and
it helps to create distortion of competition across the world.

Universal Postal Convention was created in a completely different era than the
one we are in now, namely around 1870 - at the time it was snail mail which
reigned, e-mail was by no means invented and not even the largest visionary
had thought of the idea of ​​sending the mail electronically.

If we go back to the time of the Convention's birth it was not so easy to send
a letter abroad. Each country had to enter into their own individual
agreements with every country they wanted to send mail to. If you wanted to
send mail to a country who didn't have a mail agreement with your own country,
you would have a problem.

The solution could then be to send the letter via a third country, which had
agreements in good standing with both the country you were sending from and
the country you would send to.

To calculate the postage was no trivial matter either. Here you risked the
postage getting split up in multiple parts, so that the first part covered the
mail crossing the border. Then the poor postal workers had to sit with price
lists from other countries to calculate the rest of the postage, after which
they also had to stick on a stamp for the recipient country. Should the letter
go through several countries on its journey, one can only imagine how
cumbersome the system was.

One particularly cumbersome system, without a doubt, and so thought the those
who lived at that time too. Thus, the Universal Postal Union, UPU, established
in 1874. The main pillar of this association is what we call the Universal
Postal Convention.

The Universal Postal Union was a set of rules that regulated postage prices,
and one of the most important rules was the various national postal service
does not distinguish between mail from inland and mail from abroad. As a final
pillar was the rule that the postal service in each Member State would gain
the postage that was paid to ship the overseas mail.

It was the end of letters filled with stamps from many countries. The stamp of
the sending country was enough to get all the way to the recipient's mailbox.

In 1947 UPU became a specialized agency within the UN, and it's currently the
second oldest organization within the United Nations, surpassed only by the
International Telecommunication Union - ITU. To become a member here it is a
requirement that the Universal Postal Convention is enacted. In 1969 a central
and important change was enacted, it introduced a so-called terminal fee, to
be paid if one country mails more to a country other than what it self got in
return.

This system makes it fairer for those countries that receive a lot of mail.
Here in Norway we get considerably more more mail into the country, than what
we send out, so this is an important factor we should return to later in this
comment.

You can still send letters and mail in an easy way, anywhere in the world. The
big carrot is still another. If you buy from overseas you are in fact pretty
much guaranteed a relatively nice shipping price. How nice shipping price is
depends a little on how things are sent.

If you order small electronics directly from China, you can get very cheaply
from it. Goods are basically reasonable, and shipping charges are usually a
joke. Many times you get free shipping, even if the course is baked into the
price. This low shipping cost, you can thank the Universal Postal Convention
for, since Norway has committed to deliver the item to you without any
additional premium.

Overall, Norway recieves way more mail than it send from us. This means that
Posten Norway gets more terminal charges than what we have to pay in terminal
charges to other countries. The problem is that these fees are underpriced
compared to what Posten Norway spends to deliver the mail. How much Posten
Norway lose on these mailings, they refuse to tell:

> The details are confidential, but as a net importer of mail Posten Norway
> gets more from the terminal taxes than we pay for exports to others. Our
> distribution costs are not taken into account in this calculation. Unmet
> costs we have on international mail must necessarily be covered from other
> revenue in postal operations, said press officer at Posten Norway, Hilde
> Ebeltoft Skaugrud.

So far we are assured of low freight rates from abroad, but there may be
changes in time. There is no denying that many countries are experiencing that
the money isn't enough and quickly disappears. In a few years this may change.

> The Convention is revised every four years, next in 2016, and in this
> connection we discussed the changes. Posten Norway are working to achieve
> better alignment between terminal charges and distribution costs, Ebeltoft
> Skaugrud tell us.

As of today, Posten Norway gets a variety of packages and letters from abroad
to be handed out. They get paid for the job, but nowhere near what the job is
costing them. The cost will be subsidized by the other mail clients, those who
send packages and letters in Norway.

When two countries are sending mail to each other the weight of the mail from
the country that sent the least mail to the other country is counter-
accounted. For all the excess the terminal fee has to be pain, which is
related to the general economic situation in each country. The result is that
Norway will pay a higher fee for their excess kilogram of mail than countries
such as China and the United States does. The Chinese have a right to send
parcels abroad for an amount considered fair in China, the problem is that the
sum is terribly low in a Norwegian perspective.

In a survey made ​​by the German consulting company Wissenschaftliche Institut
für Infrastructure und Kommunikationsdienste GmbH in 2011, there were several
interesting findings related to terminal charges. There Norway comes out as
one the biggest losers due to large net imports and high internal expenses.

The consulting company also shows that several other have also advocated for a
change. The (American) Department of Justice stated, among other things, in
1990 that the terminal fees that differ from the actual cost of delivery has
an ability to disrupt the competition. The European Commission said something
similar in 1992, when they stated that the terminal fees should be based on
what it costs to deliver the consignments in the recipient country.

In fact the Universal Postal Union itself makes a statement on the issue a few
years later, in 1997; and makes it clear that terminal charges not based on
the real costs within the recipient country will create incentives for trade
that is not financially sustainable with the great flow across borders.

We should be very cautious about predicting anything, but we can not envisage
that the current situation will continue forever. Various foreign online
stores of various sizes are nearest subsidized shipping to Norway, and
considering the increase in imports is probably only a matter of time before
something is done. The first opportunity to make a change is 2016 and we will
be surprised if it's not going to be a good deal more expensive to receive
packets from the rest of the world then."

// Article from HW.no (Norway's Ars Technica) translated with Google Translate
and with the language fixed manually. [http://www.hardware.no/artikler/guide-
verdenspostkonvensjone...](http://www.hardware.no/artikler/guide-
verdenspostkonvensjonen/157151?key=NGNvhkZx)

~~~
zaroth
Thank you so much for that. I guess this is basically why I am able to order
LED bulbs from China on eBay which are better quality and about 1/2 to 1/4th
the cost of a locally purchased bulb, plus they come with _free shipping_.

I had no idea how they could possibly have shipped them to me, in just about
10 days time, when the cost of the bulb seemed lower than the cost of the
shipping. So I guess this is another reason why USPS is bankrupt, because they
are legally obligated to deliver the parcel, basically for free, after a few
cents were paid in China to put a stamp on it. Amazing!

------
BenoitEssiambre
The next manufacturing frontier to cross is sub-Saharan Africa. We are
starting to see signs of it happening. For example, I just bought myself some
great shoes ( [https://www.oliberte.com/men/](https://www.oliberte.com/men/)
).

Since it is the last large severely underdeveloped place with cheap, young
capable labor and lots of natural resources, this might actually be
manufacturing's final frontier.

~~~
brianwawok
Is there enough political stability though? Outsider investors want some
degree of stability to invest in large manufacturing plants. I am not a
scholar in sub-saharan Africa, but I am not yet of the opinion that it is a
stable place to set up shop.

~~~
peteretep
About the same as Latin America, which is to say: in some places, yes, in some
places not at all. Be happy to set up in Ghana...

------
dmritard96
The supply chain is the principle advantage. Go to Hauquiangbei and show me
the equivalent in the US. Then try and get tools made. It will be half or a
third of the cost. Get something laser cut/SLAd/vacuum molded etc and it just
doesn't compare. There is a larger supply of suppliers hence more competitive
prices. Just go on alibaba and order a sheet of aluminum and do the same from
virtually anyone in the US. Energy is important but many of these materials
and parts aren't originating from the US hence you are paying to ship all the
parts, then assemble in the US and then ship to the customer. Instead the
factories in China buy in mass from local suppliers and ship the end product
once. The cost structure just ends up being superior. There are a lot of
scraps also. Not shipping those as a result of shipping final products is huge
as well.

------
sachingulaya
At what scale? I pay roughly $3/hr for welding in china.

~~~
chinathrow
And you feel pride? Seriously, 3$/h? Assumming that a large junk goes to the
shop owner, that's not a lot to make each month.

~~~
chrischen
What are you exactly suggesting everyone do? He could pay them $0/hr by not
giving them the jobs.

You're not offering any constructive feedback while criticizing from your
pedestal of inaction. I assume you used a throwaway because you didn't want to
attribute that to your personal identity.

Billions of Chinese were lifted from poverty by American globalization,
granted at the detriment of American jobs. However it forced American jobs to
be more information focused. And if you're Chinese you should understand that.
If you're American you can be proud you helped lift a country from the third
world into the second.

~~~
s73v3r
"He could pay them $0/hr by not giving them the jobs."

I've always found that to be the absolute shittiest of rebuttals, given by
those who have absolutely no point whatsoever. This person is not "giving"
anyone a job; they are not being seeing a group of people and saying, "Hmmm,
they look like they could use some work. I will create some and give it to
them." No. This person needed some work done, and they were offering work.
That's it. The person is not a "job creator"; those things don't exist.

"If you're American you can be proud you helped lift a country from the third
world into the second."

And do we get to be proud of the complete and utter skull fucking the Chinese
environment has taken as a result of that?

~~~
jblow
If you ever run a company you'll know that job creators exist.

I had a bunch of money. I could have kept it locked in a box somewhere.
Instead I decided to pay a bunch of people to help make something cool. Yes,
that's a transaction, but for my part, I didn't have to engage in it. (In fact
some days I kind of regret it, given all the garbage one has to put up with
when running a company.) I could have kept the money locked in a box and felt
happy that I feel rich. Or something.

~~~
dragonwriter
A person who runs a company is no more a job creator than a consumer who pays
for services is a job creator.

If "I have money, and I have a thing I am willing to exchange it for that
requires someone else to do work" makes you a job creator, _everyone who
purchases anything in the economy_ is a job creator.

------
PythonicAlpha
This article grossly oversimplifies things.

The shares of labor cost, energy cost and transportation cost are differing
very much from industry to industry. Also, automate of the production of
different products is differing very much. You can not compare for example car
factoring with software development or food production.

Of course, you can argue that cheap energy gives an industry an advantage. But
what happens here are things that are independent of each other. For example,
labor costs in China have risen and it gets more difficult to find cheap and
adequate workers.

Also you always should consider the consequences: Will the short-terim-
advantage for some (!) industries really outweigh the long-term consequences?

------
thomasmarriott
'The whole landscape has changed. They kept telling us we were wasting our
time, and now it has really caught fire all over the world' — George Mitchell,
father of fracking

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Mitchell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Mitchell)

------
IshKebab
Well maybe for energy-intensive industries like aluminium. It's never going to
be cheaper for things like electronics though - all the components are
manufactured in China so why ship components to America and assemble them
there when you can assemble in China for less and ship finished products?

------
Animats
As the tables in the article show, but the text does not, energy cost is a
small fraction of manufacturing cost. It's only significant for certain kinds
of heavy manufacturing; if you run a steel mill or aluminum smelter, it
matters a lot. If you make smart watches, it's insignificant. Also, oil prices
are worldwide, not local. (Natural gas is more local.)

Labor costs matter far more. As a rule of thumb, it takes a 4x labor cost
advantage to justify outsourcing to China by a US company. (For a China
company to sell into the US requires less of a labor cost differential.)

------
pronoiac
\- because fracking is bringing cheaper oil and gas, for lower energy costs.

------
jseliger
This is an important and so far underreported story. James Fallows has an
excellent, similar piece from 2014:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/made-
in-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/made-in-america-
again/379343)

------
downandout
As oil and gas prices in the US reach parity with China, China remains
relevant only where labor costs are a factor. As manufacturing becomes
increasingly automated, Chinese factory workers (and indeed most of the
world's unskilled workers) will become unemployed. That is a double edged
sword....it will be great for businesses until enough people are unemployed
that only a small percentage of the population can afford to buy the goods
they are producing.

~~~
digitalzombie
I used to have this view but it free up workers to be more educated and do
less menial tasks is a counter argument.

Having an educated labor force would keep US be competitive. Unfortunately
that means getting higher and higher degree.

~~~
burger_moon
A counter to your counter ;) would be that now you have a larger population of
young adults going head first into debt for degrees that will have an equally
expanisve labor pool. So now you graduate with a higher education degree but
so did everyone else and there may not be enough human job growth to sustain
it.

I'm not sure there is a simple answer to any of these problems.

------
vilmosi
It's not about cost, it's about speed and scale, which China does very well.

------
oksawe
Higher productivity equals lower wages. The busting of Unions, among a lot of
other things, has kept wages stagnant at best over the past decade or so.

~~~
douche
Unions are somewhat dependent on their members having skills, and cornering
the market on that set of skills. If you can't keep the people that have the
set of skills that you are unionizing around inside the union, then you can't
expect much success.

------
yeukhon
There are always two camps of people in this debate. One camp says the medical
expense and overhead dealing with regulations and union are too costly to
operate manufacturing entirely in the US. There is another camp that says the
cost operating oversea (training staff, relocating senior staff oversea, legal
and book keeping management) is close to operating in the US.

Fact is many companies are now moving away from China, and are signing up new
manufacturing sites in other Southern Asian countries such as Thailand and
Vietnam for lower operational cost (note a lot of the U.S. companies give
contract to oversea manufacturer, so it is these manufactures moving away from
their own domestic sites - for example, Foxconn being a largely a Taiwanese
company Foxconn manufactures outside of Taiwan).

I don't know how close operating in the US vs operating half of the business
offshore is. This is like hiring consultant oversea for software development.
The first burden is operational efficiency; it is painful to manage oversea
when you want your "brain power" to be in the US. For example, project manager
might have to get up early say 6-7 AM to do a stand up and then follow up at
9/10AM (because your business owner / product owner don't get up at 6 to talk
about progress). If there are bugs that need to be resolved during US hour,
you still have to pay the extra hours. You are wasting time going-back-and-
forth because your offshore team will get off work when you want to fit a
meeting in the afternoon.

While most Chinese workers do not form union (fear of repucation), workers do
come out and protest from time to time (see Foxcoon strikes). Local laws also
do not often favor US companies, and local laws can be a pain in the ass.

The only thing I can think of that will keep some companies manufacturing
outside of the U.S. is that these companies simply do not have cash in the US.
Imagine a company like Apple (Apple has like 90% of its cash outside of US)
the only way they can spend that money is do stuff outside of US.

This is just my uneducated opinion, having little idea how business and
economy works. I am all for moving closer to proximity. If you are selling in
the U.S. it makes sense to manufacture her. This is why many manufacture sites
are now built in Mexico (looking at car makers). Shipping cost have been
reduced in the last two decades because now we have bigger ships, but still,
there is a schedule that you need to maintain.

Another classic example where some part of "making" are likely done domestic
(or a place where known for using advanced technology) is the classic X
ThinkPad series. The agreement Lenovo have with IBM is that the main design is
to remain in a Japanese lab AFAIK. I am sure Lenovo has way to do stuff in
China and do stuff in Japan, and still claim stuff are done in Japan. But
branding is a good motivation for keeping certain things local.

~~~
adventured
Unions have been in a 40 year decline in the US. You can easily avoid union
labor, if that's your preference, by selectively choosing what state you set
up manufacturing in.

------
stutsmansoft
They lost me at the very first sentence.

------
jkot
I think at this point US simply has no specialized factories to manufacture
things.

~~~
nickpinkston
It's actually the opposite: We're great at speciality, high-tech stuff, but we
don't do commodity contract manufacturing as well as China. The good part of
this is that the former has far better margins than the latter.

~~~
jkot
So you are only cheaper on expensive stuff.

~~~
ghaff
It's not that simple. I was just happening to look at a plastic bucket I was
using yesterday and it was manufactured the next town over in Massachusetts,
It's probably true that the US tends not to be competitive for cheap goods
that don't have a large individual labor component. But it's more than high-
margin items.

~~~
ams6110
Injection molded plastic seems to be one industry that is still viable in the
USA (just my observation, it seems common to see plastics factories here). Not
sure why this is.

~~~
starky
Doing tooling in China and then shipping the molds to NA is the common way to
do injection moulding in NA. After that injection moulding is so automated
that the labour cost to run a machine isn't that high. That said, I've yet to
have a NA injection molder beat out the ones we use in Asia.

