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Comment by thinkloop | Hacker News Reader

The US is the #2 manufacturer in the world [1] and will overtake China this year to become #1 [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_...

[2] https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/competitiveness/med...

I would bet this is only for final assembly. I seriously doubt there is any "Made in USA" product that isn't completely dependent on some tooling or components made overseas.

Yes, but be careful with that conception. That exact same thing can be said of just about anything made anywhere. This is the nature of globalization of supply chains.

I mean it goes back long before the word “globalization” was used to mean “anything I don’t like that involved more than one country.” There was very long-distance trade thousands of years ago. Not every raw material you might want will exist in your immediate vicinity.

It would be hard to find any product these days that isn't dependent on the world-wide supply-chain, but I agree that how "manufacturing" is quantified and measured leaves a lot of room for tomfoolery.

Couple of things:

- For products containing electronics: short of the electrical components themselves, there is a healthy amount of US electronics+mechanical manufacturing, but it's more geared for lower-volume higher-margin type stuff (think for energy / agriculture / etc.)

- IIRC having spoken to someone at Jabil a few years ago, vague recollection of being told that the US is the largest manufacturer of high volume plastic goods (as well as other products using automated processes). Not so much enclosures for consumer electronics, but rather stuff like shampoo bottles, and that sort of tooling is done here in the US.

- Just keep in mind that manufacturing has a broader scope than what it seems you're implying. Not all manufactured goods involve electronics or injection molding.

Shampoo bottles make little sense to make in China. The processes are highly automated, the feedstock is cheaper in the US (way more petrochemical inputs and cheaper energy) and it would be madness to ship empty shampoo bottles over long distances.

Even US industrials like the metals industry is still chugging along, and some of it even ends up in Chinese products. It's just that the US has shifted to making more specialized metals and alloys, rather than cheap and basic metals.

True on high volume plastic bottles, caps, etc. Those must be manufactured geographically near final distribution, too expensive to ship billions of empty plastic bottles half way around world.

And lots of the tooling for this high volume plastic bottles, lids, etc is made in Germany. Consensus is Germans make best tools for this volume (100’s of millions of parts per year)

Counterpoint / However: A lot of the "made in China" products were developed and designed in the US.

Sure but most Chinese factories operate using manufacturing equipment made in the US or Germany.

This is absolutely and patently false for 99% of Chinese manufacturing. I suggest you watch Strange Parts videos to see what manufacturing in China is actually like before making a fool of yourself.

Final assembly only would be the last strategy applied in the US due to high labor costs. The competitiveness of US manufacturing is due to high levels of automation.

I wouldn't trust a projection from 2015 (!) about relative US-vs-China manufacturing volume. Hell, I wouldn't trust a projection from 2 weeks ago.

Is this adjusted for PPP?

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