Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerkstate | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook insisted for years that you just couldn't manufacture stuff outside of China because of the high level of manufacturing skill. [1] Looks like that wasn't really true and it just took a little effort to start up in a different country, all it took was a small increase in the cost of doing business in China.

[1] https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...

View on HN

They're still being made by Foxconn, so all that manufacturing expertise is still there. In the long run my guess is that this knowledge will start to trickle to more local manufacturers.

This seems like a great deal for India: threaten a 22% duty, and then you bring in jobs and know-how.

>This seems like a great deal for India: threaten a 22% duty, and then you bring in jobs and know-how.

Lots of products have very high duties but you'll not find a single manufacturers of those products within the country.

Those companies simply add import duty to their cost and increase the price of good in local market. This makes products/tool expensive for local people and they are not able to compete globally.

If an America can buy a CNC mill from china duty free and you charge duty which makes $4000 mill cost $7000. Due to higher costs, your local craftman is already rendered uncompetitive in global marketplace

Why not let them buy tools and machines duty free and let them learn skills like CNC machining or metal turning?

Or, maybe he was correct the whole time and it just took this many years to change.

It was true. This is bootstrapping you make it false.

we'll see what the defect rate is soon enough

People said the same about china when manufacturing was sent there.

This may come as a shock, but it was relevant then and it's relevant now. There's a perception that QA suffers when production is moved to an area where the manufacturing ecosystem is not as established, which is why people pay attention to defect rates and study process paradigms like Six Sigma.

that's what we'd be comparing it against, I think people say the same thing about any newly spun up factory on earth

The difference is that India has a very large population willing to train for the relevant skills. America does not.

India's population is larger but I see no reason to believe Indians are more willing to learn skills than Americans. Would you mind explaining your argument, or at least backing it up with some kind of evidence?

The US labor market has long exhibited massive demand for skilled labor, and that's part of the reason that two-thirds of high-school graduates immediately enroll in college. USN&WR lists the US as being perceived fifth in the world for producing skilled workers, behind Japan, Germany, South Korea, and China.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/slideshows/top-10...

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=51

> The US labor market has long exhibited massive demand for skilled labor, and that's part of the reason that two-thirds of high-school graduates immediately enroll in college.

American college grads are not typically seeking to work as skilled assembly workers in factories. They might seek to be engineers or project and business managers in those factories, but not the people who assemble the devices.

That requires a large pool of skilled manual labor which the US doesn't produce as much anymore. By contrast, Germany produces a large number of highly skilled vocational workers who supply labor for its high-end manufacturing industry.

> American college grads are not typically seeking to work as skilled assembly workers in factories.

Certainly, and that is almost entirely reflective of labor market demand. Workers pursue skills that are pertinent to jobs for which there is labor demand.

Reflow soldering and other electronics manufacturing skills are not particularly grueling to learn, but they don't make as much sense in a diversified postindustrial economy where manufacturing is not the target sector for most workers.

The USA has a larger manufacturing sector than Germany, but manufacturing is a smaller proportion of the American economy (12%) than of the German economy (23%).

https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scor...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com