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U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

fortune.com

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Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#101

Post by starky »

ams6110 wrote: post #66
ghaff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#102

Post by sfrealist »

noir_lord wrote: post #97
sfrealist wrote: post #96

But the US labor force is increasingly composed of African Americans (average IQ of 86) and Hispanics (90) [1], versus Chinese labor force consisting of Han Chinese (average IQ 106). Thus it still has no competitive advantage. 1. http://www.rlynn.co.uk/

Source? Because I'm calling bullshit on those figures, IQ tests are notoriously unreliable across cultural and societal boundaries. Hell even across economic boundaries within the same society.

Edited to add one source, but there's a lot of literature on the subject, from Prof. Lynn to James Watson (Double helix discoverer), and William Shockley (transistor con-inventor): just look up the Wikipedia articles in them before these posts get whited out by the PC police here

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#103

Post by tarikjn »

kristofferR wrote: post #36
pjc50 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Export post from China is heavily subsidised.

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 r…

This subject is very interesting to me. If I understand correctly, if I mail you more than you send me (us being countries), I thus collect more money on stamping. We balance it by me paying you terminal dues (rated against my local costs). By lowering my shipping costs internally, I can also lower my terminal dues -- if it is within my control -- to you and thus also improve my exports.

This is potentially a double negative for you, 1. if you labor or other costs are higher, you lose more, 2. your carriers try to make up for it by increasing your outbound shipping costs, affecting your exports

Instead of doing real-cost rebalancing, the "fairness" balancing, is susceptible to be pulled down to zero and runs the risk of a disconnection with labor, energy and environnement costs. Further, this type of market mechanism favors a runaway dynamic ie. if a country ships a lot, it gets even better and better for them, as they develop economies of scale.

Sounds like whatever made the multi-stamp system too complicated before 1969 might now be feasible with technology, as it may have been the more market-true, and thus future-proof approach.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#104

Post by tptacek »

bobjordan wrote: post #54

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 experienc…

How did you end up owning a factory in Shenzhen?

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#105

Post by clumsysmurf »

unquietcode wrote: post #51

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…

> Some of their cities are today near uninhabitable, some are just unbearably smoggy.

I remember hearing about an 8-year old girl suffering from lung cancer. This is very sad

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/chinas-choice/2013/no...

Recently read a story in Rolling Stone on pollution in Vernal Utah from fracking.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/fracking-whats-...

Many high risk wells in the US are not being inspected. And the fracking industry doesn't want anyone to.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/23/3451919/high-ris...

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#107

Post by __z »

brianwawok wrote: post #91
megablast wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#108

Post by 21p »

lugg wrote: post #84
21p wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that the world is nowhere near "doomed" or even heading in that direction. It's not fair to claim racism here, however. The poster did not mention anything about race.

Last I checked you didn't need to use the word race to be a racist. I think you're nit picking at a point that was admittedly shaky.

the subject of race has to somehow be implied or involved for the comment/person to be racist. No one is claiming racists will just tell you its a race issue.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#109

Post by peteretep »

brianwawok wrote: post #92
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #55

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/ ). 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.

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.

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...

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#110

Post by bobjordan »

g8gggu89 wrote: post #90
bobjordan wrote: post #54

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 experienc…

I want a tour of your dorms and factories. Can you post pics of a bunch of the buffet meals, please?

Welcome to check up for a blog post in coming weeks at blog.asianops.com. We're also redoing the websites listed in my bio that will have tons more pics (live 4-6 weeks from now).
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