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While the internet is highly variable in this question, it appears that for the cases where it is cheaper to manufacture in china, the cost of manufacturing is only about 5% cheaper.

In some other cases where all the components are already made in the states, it can be upwards of 20% cheaper to make it here, because of the shorter lead time, less complex supply chain, as well as other factors.

The cost differential of China has effectively vanished due to rising wages, the implementation of some environmental rules, and increasing strength of the RMB.

What China does have is well established closely knit supply chains, which means its a shorter lead-time to start new production of a given widget - this is something that we can fix over time, and in my opinion, this may be the biggest lasting change from this crisis. We effectively got caught with our pants down in this crisis because of this.

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This is anecdotal but I have yet to find a PCB manufacturer in the US that can do it cheaper than Chinese fabs at anything less than ridiculous scale - high speed digital/RF included. I still use US manufacturers half the time because of IP, timeline, or quality concerns (its just easier to get on the phone with someone who can help) but I don't see how the other manufacturers could be within 5% of China's cost when circuit boards at anywhere from 2x to 10x more expensive here.

I'm curious, what run size are you looking at?

From ten to about one million. There are major caveats though: The middle volume boards (4-5 figures) were far more complex mixed signal boards with 10-20 layers and clock speeds ranging from several hundred Mhz for RAM busses to 1 ghz for MIPI to 2-50ghz for radios. Those projects had special needs and required quite a bit more manpower during the fabrication stage for layer alignment and in the assembly stage for tuning, since they exploited some nonlinearities in different components for high precision synchronization.

The large volume boards (6-7 figures) where consumer electronics focused and extremely price sensitive so the combined savings from colocation of fab and assembly were often significantly more than any savings automation or logistics in the United States, especially accounting for risk.

You probably know them, but oshpark is great! You pay by the square inch, which was really fortunate for me because I needed a (very) small pcb for a project, and they made and shipped it to me (to Germany!) for less than 2$ at the time. Though I think they since implemented a lower bound on size/price.

Also, the purple/gold finish is gorgeous.

Where did you pull that 5% number out from?

I saw it quoted in three different blogspam articles, I basically googled and opened the first 10 results. I was having trouble finding a hard study - but people I know who work in manufacturing have quoted me "for us its cheaper to make it here" to "up to 20% more" so the 5% number didnt feel out of place.

I visited a factory here in the UK last year (with some school students), who make plastic injection moulded parts and items. The CEO there said that yes they do manufacture a proportion of their goods in China but the reason that they still manufacture in the UK was that China was a long way away and in fact didn't turn out that much cheaper in the end so there was still money to be made by having a more responsive supply chain with more hands-on quality control. There is a lot of automation in injection moulding though.

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