Chips production is one thing, but the whole ecosystem matters. So these chips produced in Europe must be sent back to Asia for integration in final products. Or a miracle will happen and European Union will resurrect manufacturing? I doubt, because manufacturing means missing climate goals.
The robots that assemble the electronic circuits are also largely built in EU. (And, of course, in Japan, too.)
What made Apple to order their iPhone production from a Chinese company was not the availability of relevant hardware elsewhere; certainly the US has it. It was the nimbleness of that company, the willingness to move fast and make things available fast. Paradoxically, less red tape and less corporate shenanigans. Cheap labor? Maybe, but it did not appear to be the major factor, and wages at Foxconn were / are not as low, by EU standards even.
And this is compared to US; in Germany, things would be even slower, to say nothing of France (which is a real industrial powerhouse nevertheless).
Um, the CNC machines that iPhone production uses are actually made in the US and shipped to China because the Chinese CNC machines can't handle the tolerance.
So, why is Apple shipping it there then?
Cheap labor is the answer.
And, why is Apple starting to ship production away from China?
Cheap labor is still the answer.
As we found out, the supply chains in China weren't that robust. You can put them wherever without a lot of problem and they take about 12 months to come up to speed. That's not very long at all in the manufacturing world.
Maybe a price that would allow such speed in an American company exists, but likely it's sky-high.
The Chinese one was sky-high, too. It's just that the Chinese government ate the cost.
[0] apparently they once moved 12K workers from one line to another at midnight for a last minute design change
I don't understand - do you think there is no manufacturing in Europe?
To give a concrete example - some European car factories are shut down due to... lack of chips.
A lot of minor manufacturing, plus a lot of assembly to be able to call the final product e.g. "german made" and have the associated tax-cuts...
They use Chinese components... to manufacture planes... in Europe.
"plus a lot of assembly to be able to call the final product e.g. "german made" and have the associated tax-cuts..."
Or, in your words:
"They use Chinese components... to manufacture planes... in Europe."
By contrast, the Chinese COMAC airplane consists largely of of imported parts.
Europe is the second largest manufacturer of cars for example. And half the world's planes are made here. That's not minor.
> plus a lot of assembly
Right... assembling chips into things for example.
Wasn't that the point? The chips don't need to be sent to Asia in order to put them in products.
Modern supply chains are really complex. Your laptop might uses chips manufactured in Taiwan by Dutch lithography machines, have a screen build in South Korea using German automation devices, run on software made in the USA, all shipped on a Japanese-build vessel.
There is also some final component assembly (but that is not a major portion of value add), it is used to capture subsidies and claim that stuff is "made in X" when it is assembled from parts made all over the world.
The problem is that this is critically depending on IP -- e.g. your designs not being stolen -- and also there are some industries where manufacturing knowledge is the value-add rather than the design. In those situations, Europe can't compete because the factories are elsewhere. America suffers from the same issues and is also falling behind, so this is a general issue with "the west".
Not that this is a bad thing as such, and it's not like it's all gone.
Also, because a lot of these companies don't produce the latest shiny gadget or manipulative abusive online website that would be literally illegal such as Facebook or Uber (both of which have little actual "innovation" outside of the business model), some people (Americans especially, it seems) seem to think Europe is some backwater where no actual high-tech industry is done, all the while typing on their computer made possible by companies such as ASML, FEI, Neways, and many more. Shrug.
>I doubt, because manufacturing means missing climate goals.
So you are saying a chip factory can not be powered by green energy. Why? Taiwan does it, too: https://www.evwind.es/2020/07/08/orsted-taiwans-tsmc-sign-wo...
TSMC is under a perceived threat from China, and the US has prohibted the Chinese from using TSMC.
This leaves a lot of business open to take. The US wants it back on their soil with the TSMC plant in Arizona.
The Europeans want something similar.
After all we have ASML here in the middle of western europe and god knows how many mid-sized factories. Surely this is not a stupid idea. Perhaps we can make the chips for Huawei here in Germany so everyone knows the phones and routers are safe and secure to use.
I'm not sure how those factories compare though.
If we can ship bananas from Guatemala to Portland before they turn yellow, I'm certain that we could send chips from a Western fab to an Eastern assembly plant.
I think the bigger challenge is perhaps getting the boules/substrates. My understanding is that the best ones come from Japan, and if your fab yield is low, you're getting far more raw inputs than finished outputs. One solution to that problem would be to make the silicon crystal in the same region as the fabs. Another would be to set up a distributor corporation that buys in massive bulk to get shipping costs down, then slowly sells off inventory to manufacturers.
There are some essential chemicals involved in semiconductor fabrication as well, but I think you can probably find those in any region of the first world.