Hope and illusion surround the opportunity of bringing manufacturing activities outsourced to China back to the USA. The flux of productive investments toward the Big Dragon over the past 30 years never experienced any slowdowns, and transformed the economic fabric of the US even more radically. At this point, the superiority of the service sector in the GDP’s composition is indestructible and unattainable. In any case, many enterprises have either already returned operations to the US, are thinking about doing it (as revealed recently by the Boston Consulting Group), or they have stopped delocalizing and are investing directly on American soil. This is the case of the textile industry, one of the mature sectors most penalized by the Chinese alternative (since 1990, jobs in this sector have declined by 77%), which is now flourishing in the USA to the point of causing a scarcity of skilled labor specialized in sewing and tailoring. Now, the sector has recovered and is expanding at home, headed toward quality and therefore the employment of specialized talent. The phenomenon is in line with the Obama administration’s objective, which wants, for obvious reasons, to increase employment. The revival underway hasn’t yet relented with the same weight on unemployment as a result of increases in efficiency and a reduction in costs, a classic case of jobless recovery. We need to look to the other side of the Pacific to understand the origin of the phenomenon. China has become a less attractive magnet even for high-intensity production. Salaries are increasing by 15-20% per year in the face of substantial stability in the US. The welcome and the financial savings are much less advantageous, and real estate is expensive. Growing demand for quality and rapid restocking are more and more the keys to success in the US market compared to the industrial cost of the product, penalizing China. A phase of fast industrialization—where foreign capital and know-how were indispensible—is coming to an end in China. Even Chinese business people are looking for quality and innovation to differentiate themselves in crowded low-end markets while at the same time moving production to neighboring countries where labor costs are more attractive. Minimum salaries in China are now $175 compared to $50 in Vietnam and $37 in Bangladesh. Beijing’s advantage no longer lies in low costs, but in the centrality of the value chain. It’s the highways, the fleets, and the ports that are motivating investment decisions. A growing internal market and the slowing albeit sustained economic cycle support demand. Production sophistication—still an objective, not an acquisition—leaves little room for products based solely on competitive prices. It’s probably that in this framework of uncertainty—the crisis, the birth of other production centers, and transformation within China—investments may return to the US, and that reshoring may be accompanied by the tested offshoring. In any case, we will need to verify the dimensions and the timeframe of this phenomenon. Investment decisions have long-term repercussions on occupation, and other regions will compete with the US’s costs; there are at least 50 other countries where delocalization is very cheap and frequently undignified.
Share
