He Comes Mr China: Why the Future of Industry Is in America
He Comes Mr China: Why the Future of Industry Is in America. « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
You can’t keep a good man down.
It seems that is equally true of a nation’s economic potential. New ideas, new products and the determination to lead in both innovation and the vision to see what is possible and to look into the future. Other nations may copy us and our technology and they may produce products for far less money than we can. When comes to innovation and leading however, we stand front and center. No one can do it better or faster.
With new technologies and ideas coming into fruition, manufacturing is set to take off her in the US.
And now, the Chinese, like their American entrepreneurial counterparts are looking to build products here.
For decades, every trend in manufacturing favored the developing world and worked against the United States. But new tools that greatly speed up development from idea to finished product encourage start-up companies to locate here, not in Asia. Could global trade winds finally be blowing toward America again?
Near the end of this year’s second presidential debate, Candy Crowley of CNN pointed out that iPads, iPhones, and other globally sought-after Apple products are all made in China. What would it take, she asked both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, to “convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?”
I listened to this question with special interest, since I was following the debate, via hotel-room TV, from the Shenzhen manufacturing zone of southern China, where many of those same iPads and iPhones are made. For the few days before the debate, I’d been revisiting PCH International, an outsourcing company I’d first written about for this magazine in 2007, in “China Makes, the World Takes.” The company’s revenues have increased more than sevenfold since then and its workforce has grown almost as fast, despite the years of global recession. This is testament both to its own success and to the nonstop surge of outsourcing contracts to China.
The day after the debate, I walked through the famous Foxconn complex in the Longhua district of Shenzhen, where some 230,000 Chinese workers, mainly between the ages of 18 and 25, turn out products sold under international brand names, from Apple and Dell to Nintendo and Sony. Another Foxconn facility not far away employs another 200,000 people; throughout China the company’s workforce numbers 1.3 million. On previous attempts to get in over the years, I had never made it past Foxconn’s front gate—not surprising given the company’s policy of stiff-arming most foreign and domestic reporters…