Prepare to Start Making Things Again
China's march to global dominance in manufacturing is slowing down. By Chinese standards, its official claim of 14.7 percent year-to-year growth in exports for April is relatively lackluster -- and the physical trade flow data suggest that it may be overstated by as much as 60 percent. The image of the robotic "blue ant" Chinese worker-hordes is long out of date. The country's spectacular economic growth has vaulted large segments of its population into the middle class, and they want better pay and benefits, shorter work weeks, and other perquisites that their Western peers enjoy.
As China's momentum slips, U.S. manufacturing fortunes are on an upswing. U.S. corporations made unusually high profits in the wake of the Great Crash: During the weak recovery years of 2010-2012, after-tax corporate profits were 43 percent higher than during the stronger recovery of 2003-2005, according to my calculations. Workers took the brunt of the decline, while corporations invested their savings in a brutal restructuring of production operations. Cruel as that was, the United States has emerged from the crash as one of the world's most cost-competitive manufacturers.
According to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Chinese worker productivity is still growing at about 8 percent a year, an extraordinary rate -- but worker compensation is growing more than twice as fast. From 2000 to 2010, average wages in south China's Yangtze delta, a manufacturing hotbed, jumped from $0.72 an hour to $8.62. Factoring in worker output, land costs, and the rising costs of long-distance shipping (as well as the relative lack of corruption), U.S. manufacturing is approaching competitive parity with China. BCG also estimates that the United States can undersell firms in Japan and Europe by as much as 25 to 45 percent, and that it may also have the world's best trade logistics capabilities.
The hidden costs of outsourcing often loom the largest, but they don't show up on profit statements. For example, when General Electric, a pioneer of offshoring among U.S. flagship companies, began moving its multi-billion dollar appliance manufacturing back from China as costs converged, they discovered that the lack of contact between their design and production teams had caused their designs to stagnate. The company realized a 20 percent overall savings on their first "reshored" appliance, a water heater, just by re-engineering it to reduce material costs and labor inputs. Onshore production also makes it easier to keep up with today's just-in-time delivery mandates and ever-more-rapid product cycles. (And like all U.S. companies, GE has become very wary of the Chinese propensity to knock off market-leading product designs.)
The data supporting the manufacturing recovery story are still mostly anecdotal, but the anecdotes are coming in floods, not as straws in the wind. Recent surveys show that up to a fourth of U.S. companies offshoring in low-income countries have been moving some or all of their production back home, while a third are researching the question. Meanwhile, at home, factory automation keeps labor-force costs in check, and U.S. manufacturing unions are far less militant than they once were. Caterpillar, Ford, and Whirlpool have been reshoring major product lines as well, and other major manufacturers will likely follow.
Meanwhile, an impressive list of foreign companies is relocating factories to the United States: Samsung is building a semiconductor plant in Texas; Airbus will make planes in Alabama; Toyota is outsourcing production of minivans to Indiana for export to Asia. Rolls-Royce has been expanding its U.S. airplane engine parts production operations to service its global customers.
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