I recently returned from a short trip to Shenzhen, the large Chinese city less than an hour’s drive north of Hong Kong. When anyone wonders why we don’t build consumer electronic products in the United States, the one word answer is Shenzhen.
When I first traveled to this city more than 30 years ago, I’d walk out of the train station and see locals hawking live chickens and the sidewalks filled with homeless people. I’d get into a cab that was usually filthy, both inside and out, and pray for my life while the driver navigated gravel roads full of ruts with his head sticking out of his window because the windshield was covered with mud. At that time, the area was full of factories making cheap consumer goods. Now, Shenzhen is a large modern city comparable to Shanghai or even Hong Kong. As I was reminded on this trip, Shenzhen has turned into the world capital of consumer electronics manufacturing. Shenzhen is to the making of these products as Silicon Valley is to designing them.
In fact, there’s a practical bond between the two areas, evident each day at breakfast at any one of the dozens of internationally branded hotels, such as the Sheraton, Shangri-La, Hyatt, Hilton, Four Seasons, St. Regis and Westin.
At breakfast you see tables full of young American engineers and project managers from Apple, Google, HP, GoPro, Amazon and dozens of smaller startups beginning their day before heading into the factories to solve problems and get their products into production. For many, it’s a constant shuttle between the San Francisco and Hong Kong airports — as often as twice a month for some.
An employee monitors machinery that adheres components to smartphone circuit boards in a manufacturing facility at ZTE Corp.’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China. Brent Lewin/Bloomberg
It’s certainly not much fun to make the 15-hour flight, especially crunched up in an economy seat. But, in spite of that, making the trip is the best way to take your product from an idea to manufacturing with the greatest chance of success — not just for large companies, but even for entrepreneurs with an idea.
Shenzhen companies thrive on building new products and there are usually companies skilled in your area. You can find an experienced team for not much cost, because they want to fill their factories.
Shenzhen looks much like any other large modern city but, with a population of 10.35 million, everything is larger in scale. It has the largest library in the world and the largest city hall. Beneath the appearance of a buzzing metropolis full of skyscrapers and clogged highways is a network of thousands of companies focused on supporting the world’s thirst for the next smartphone, HD TV or gizmo you didn’t know you needed until you read about it.
These companies are housed in factories scattered within a two hour radius that vary from nondescript cement structures to sprawling office parks that look like ones you might see in Japan or Taiwan. Depending on what they produce, they can be as clean as an automated Japanese factory or something resembling a sweatshop from the 1930s. Occasionally, but not often, there will be a factory producing low-cost components that barely skirt the laws of tolerable working conditions but that’s the exception rather than the rule when it comes to technology products.
But what this network in Shenzhen — supported by huge factories in other cities such as Shanghai — does better than anywhere else in the world is build huge volumes of the components that go into consumer electronic products: lithium-ion batteries, LCD displays, touch screens, motors, electrical components, switches, plastic moldings, printed circuit boards, semiconductors, packaging, antennas, speakers, microphones, leather, plastic and other assorted materials. For each component, there are scores of companies in intense competition to keep the prices down and advance the technology.
There’s one human characteristic that’s also important and it’s not labor costs, although that is a secondary factor. It’s the attitude of the people who work in this industry. They have a high work ethic and can-do attitude that gets things accomplished without any fear of failing or thinking something can’t be done — even when sometimes it can’t. Whether companies are thriving or struggling, they will rarely turn away new business and most have an insatiable thirst to try new things so they can learn and grow.
Now, it’s not all rosy. Every company has strengths and weaknesses, A teams and C teams, smart and not so. Interest in taking on your product can wane if sales don’t meet expectation or if a bigger customer comes along. It’s often painful to get things done with junior people. But, in the end, there’s no better alternative. As to copying your product, it’s not a big issue. When it occurs, it’s usually by other companies that become aware of it once the product goes on sale.
I’m often asked why we can’t make these products in the United States. When it comes to a high-volume consumer electronic product that contains a variety of components, building it in the United States is just not practical or often even possible, while still maintaining the cost, quality and fast time to market. Even if it were, we don’t have the same attitude of taking quick action and being responsive.
When Motorola tried building its smartphone in a plant in Texas, the company needed to import the parts from China. There are virtually no companies in the United States that make batteries, displays, speakers, semiconductor chips and wire for mass-produced products. While there may be companies building some of these components in low volume for the military, few are competitively priced.
Can it be Done in the USA?
The United States does build printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs), partly because it’s a highly automated process using assembly machines and components available worldwide. But you still need to take those PCBAs and combine them with the touch screens, the lithium-ion batteries and the tiny motors and speakers. To import these efficiently you must send them by boat and that takes a couple of weeks and ties up lots of dollars in inventory costs.
But, more importantly, suppose that when the displays arrive, they have a defect. What do you do? If you were building the product in Shenzhen, you would call the company that’s an hour away and they will have engineers in your factory in a few hours to fix the problem. Try that from the United States and you would likely shut down your assembly line for several weeks.
Multiply this by the hundreds of parts and processes that go into your product that comes from China. Not only is it inefficient, but it’s also just not practical to build these kinds of products in the United States. Even if a company were to try, it could not compete with its competitors on many dimensions. A perhaps cruel, but accurate, analogy is trying to build an automobile in the Arctic from parts made in Detroit.
Thanks for the summary.
It only sheds light that we don’t have the vision, leadership, and will to do these things. When we wanted to build a nuclear bomb, or go to the moon (infinitely more complicated endeavors), we found a way.
In the US there is a ‘vision.’
But that ‘vision’ primarily consists short term profit goals, an overall willingness to exploit tax laws, environmental laws, and labor laws elsewhere–all combined with government policies that reward said ‘vision.’
At one point there was a drive to promote ‘Economic Patriotism,’ of sorts. But “Buy American” was a union slogan, and everyone knows that unions caused every single problem ever faced in this country. It was reported on Fox News.
And now I shall dismount from my soapbox.
Wholeheartedly agree, especially with your “informed” sarcasm ;-). In the end of the day, it’s a reflection on our society.
Yes, our priorities were focused on the defense industries while China focused on the consumer tech industry.
Power structures not-withstanding, unions have done a lot to improve working conditions. We have long ago eschewed the notion of the workers needing living onsite. In those terms we, philosophically and thus culturally, are more focused on the individual than China. Almost no one in the U. S. would allow themselves to be used as the workers in China. I don’t see that as a problem. I’m not a union member, but I’ve worked for the producers who think labour is disposable.
Joe
This isn’t just about differences in material resources, however. Or, actually it is a differences of philosophy of whether or not the human worker is a material resource. U. S. labourers are less likely to be “used” the way Chinese workers are. Not a moral assessment, but a cultural philosophical difference, not just from the top but also from the bottom of the hierarchy.
Culturally as comparison, one should examine how the Chinese furniture industry took deliberate measures to pretty much over-throw the US furniture industry. This was a philosophy shared from bottom to top of the labour chain.
Joe
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