The state of manufacturing

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Mobster
Soldato
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A lot of things are made in China: iPhones, iPads, Windows PCs, etc, etc. What do people think about this? There are a lot of stories about alleged human rights abuses, etc.

Will manufacturing return to the UK, US and other MEDCs as China becomes even more developed?

Curious to hear your thoughts.
 
We make quite a lot of stuff in the UK, it just isn't consumer electronics.

We do expensive, difficult stuff. Turbine blades. Bits of car engine. Valves, strangely enough. Fuel cells. Bits of wing. Some food related things. We write a lot of software too, which looks a bit like manufacturing if you squint.

It's not enough, but manufacturing hasn't solely gone abroad.

edit: Oh, longer term manufacturing will go where the automation is. The counter to cheap labour abroad is sophisticated robotics locally - machines that never sleep, draw no wages and never make a mistake.
 
Some time in the future, company's will move production to a poor country due to low wages that they pay the workers. As China starts to grow, and the basic wage increases, the more the government will clamp down on human rights abuses.
 
I can't see it returning fully to the UK ever, mainly because it will not be as cheap for the companies to produce things, driving up costs, and decreasing profit margins.
 
Not a chance. If/when wages in China rise to the point where these companies can no longer sustain their massive profit margins then they'll simply up sticks and move on to another under-developed country with little concern about their citizens human rights.
 
We make lots of things here but most people only want what is cheap as possible. You can have shoes, clothes, cars, motorbikes, furniture, kitchenware, food etc.
 
The key to getting more manufacturing back in this country is cheap energy to power the big robots we need for mass production
 
I second what some above said that the UK manufactures expensive, difficult to make stuff. Cheap stuff etc. will of course go to where cheap labor is.
 
We just built a fairly large frame that holds some kind of machine and a fair few of the parts for the actual machine. Thats for a company thats selling it to Rolls Royce, It's getting shipped out to Tawain some time next week.
 
After WW3 we(you i guess now technically :P) will be making all our own ploughs and scythes in the UK.
 
I work in concrete products manufacture. (kerbs slabs etc) mostly for the building trade and motorway maintenance agencies but we also supply the like's of B&q.

at the minute we are flat out in our factory with all 4 machines going 10 hours a day.

we did get a slow down a few years ago when no one was building much but its got much better.
 
We manufacture very high value items globally. The issue with China is that you have a really high staff turnover which when you have a complex operation that requires a lot of training, drives you nuts. Germany and France are a nightmare due to restrictive Union practices. The uk a little less but you have to work with your staff to get the engagement and flexibility you need. Good shop floor operators with the right aptitude and attitude are hard to find in the uk
 
The company I work for makes the material for jet engine blades, engine components, airframe parts and other aerospace stuff. Very high ticket items that the end manufacturers have tried going abroad for in the past but have mostly come back because they are not as good as us. Strangely they prefer aeroplanes not to fall out of the sky because they cut corners in China.
 
AlecR said:
A lot of things are made in China: iPhones, iPads, Windows PCs, etc, etc. What do people think about this? There are a lot of stories about alleged human rights abuses, etc.

Will manufacturing return to the UK, US and other MEDCs as China becomes even more developed?

Curious to hear your thoughts.
Click to expand...

Manufacturing of high volume complex electronic devices won't return to the UK, because they were never here to start with. We build tons of stuff here, it's just not disposable electronics on razor-thin margins.
 
Makes no sense for us t try doing cheap manufacturing. Need to keep investing in education and research and get the big ticket items, where people want quality/cutting edge, not cheap mass produced.

As for welfare of the workers, it's the way it is and cannot be anything else. Such countries (even china) simply can't afford the rights we have and without such manufacturing the economy won't grow and if their economies never grows they will never slowly gain rights.
China is still hugely poor, their money per capita is tiny compared to the west.
 
UK manufacturing is still 7th highest in the world.

Manufacturing per head is only 23rd though. But that's in line with historic rankings.

manufacturing.JPG

http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN05809.pdf

What you are lamenting is the rise of services which has displaced they low productivity manufacturing sectors as a proportion of the UK economy. As other people have mentioned the high productivity manufacturing sectors still exist in the UK.
 
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If I'm honest, I don't see China's human rights improving any time soon, so cheap labor will likely stay there for the foreseeable future!
 
I visited a company last year (Japanese) whose European headquarters is in Worcester. They basically make machines that are capable of building other machines, so it's pretty damn useful to all kinds of other companies around the world.

There is manufacturing here but like has been said, the PC components, phones, etc, are not really something the UK does but that's nowhere near a full representation of what manufacturing is anyway.
 
muon said:
UK manufacturing is still 7th highest in the world.

Manufacturing per head is only 23rd though. But that's in line with historic rankings.
Click to expand...

It's difficult to trust a graph that claims the percentage of national output is currently around 115%. Graph in general doesn't make a great deal of sense.

The source (identity and validity) is also a bit unclear, but thank you for attaching the pdf.
 
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