Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

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It is probably not the full answer. I think they are just willing to go the extra mile for what we here in the west would consider "not much money".

Just few weeks ago I ordered my first design from pcbway. (Both first order from them, and the first PCB I ever designed.)

Turns out I was a muppet and made multiple mistakes with my component footprints/selection. One of the connectors just simply didn't fit, the other connector was colliding with a resistor and an IC next to it. Complete shambles and absolutely my mistake.

They were super nice about it. Sent a detailed excel sheet with photos and arrows on the photos illustrating the problems. The sheet had detailed english description of what is wrong and they even had suggestion how they could "bodge" things to still get it working as well as they can given my design mistakes.

We exchanged emails about options and eventually figured out the best way to do it. They did as good a job as they could with my faulty design and now I'm a happy owner of the assembled PCBs.

The whole thing cost $85 for my five boards, components, and assembly. (I think shipping was not included in that price.) Which is "not a lot of money" where I am , and I would certainly not go to this much trouble for that much.

What I'm saying with this story is that "industrial robot and some custom software" doesn't get you this part of the service. Where someone messages you back and forth to figure out how to salvage the poxy design sent by someone incompetent like me.

Sounds like the classic strategy of good-customer-service.

85$ is not a lot of money in China either. Double so for English speaking help. Triple so when you get assembled PCBs at the end.

The theory I've heard is that where American business culture prioritizes profit, Chinese businesses are chasing market share. Thus you get combinations like Rumba and Kin Yat. Roomba subcontracts all manufacturing to China, earns incredible gross margins, while the Chinese manufacturer is free to make competitors. In time the competitors tech reaches and exceeds the original. Now Roomba is left with low/mid tier product lines and Chinese companies control the majority market share.

Great while it lasted. Lots of profits for over a decade. The profit maxing strategy just lacks a future.

> The profit maxing strategy just lacks a future.

That's pretty much it. The best way to make a strict "profit" in many cases is to buy large messy bundles of assets/debts (companies), destroy the integration, and sell off the individual assets; that is, the private equity playbook.

But destroying is easy, building is hard.

Completely different kind of business but I have a friend who runs a small business doing industrial print work (stickers, metal plates with serial numbers/qr codes, etc.). Pretty niche but very interesting. He uses premium materials and machines and rapid response times to customers is one of his key selling points. Next day deliveries and those kinds of things via premium delivery services. Business is going well for him and I've talked a lot to him about how he runs things.

His machines are expensive (hundreds of thousands of euros) and his key challenge is keeping those busy and having redundant capacity when they break down or need servicing. Meaning that he has a lot of idling machines. He's mostly floorspace constrained and he just doubled his floor space so he can get more machines and improve utilization.

So, I asked him if he was going to get more people as well. And to my surprise his answer was, not really. The machines do most of the work. Setting them up is not his biggest challenge. Availability of the machines is. That's why he's doubling floor space. He was estimating that he would be able to operate the new machines with the same staff. Most of what they do is preparing print jobs, supplying materials, packaging up finished stuff, etc. Having more space simply means he can respond faster.

He also went through the process to become iso certified. Meaning he has quality control and processes. Basically any machine downtime costs him money. So, he has at least two of each. And he's good at small batch sizes. He has a lot of repeat customers that order small batches regularly. For example, cutting out metal plates means he has to put in a big metal sheet. Regardless of whether it's 3 or 300 metal plates that are being ordered. He's going to sacrifice at least one of those sheets. But he can do some clever things with combining orders from different customers in one print job (he's a software guy) which works around this. And he has supplies of pre-cut plates for his repeat customers that are ready for printing when they order 2 more plates. They pay for quality and speed. A lot of his competitors are slower.

There's a fixed overhead per job (set up time, packaging, customer support, etc.). But he's good at that stuff and gives a lot of quality support to his customers. Big batches mean he utilizes the machines for longer and that they generate more revenue. His staff can use the time to prepare the next job and take care of customers. A lot of the small stuff ends up being bundled up.

I imagine electronics manufacturing contracting is a bit similar to this.

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