This year, I hope to transition assembly to China, where all of our parts originate.
I tried working with a US vendor on assembling PCBs, and the soldering was incredibly sloppy. They repaired it for free, but it was a month delay when we didn't have a lot of time to spare. I gave them another chance and the next batch they did had a defect rate of 30% whereas our Chinese vendor's rate is <1%, so I bailed on them at that point.
I also tried working with US-based sheet metal vendors on making enclosures for my product, and it cost 6x as much as the Chinese competitors for drastically poorer quality.[0]
[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-...
As a little bootstrapped startup, I can relate. I've also had on-shore production and sourcing issues that couldn't be resolved without unexpected costs/delays. And, culturally, Chinese vendors seem more straightforward or at least aligned with small makers. Their starting point is what they can offer rather than qualifying you as a customer.
I get that it's hard to compete on price with overseas labor. But in theory, our more-educated workforce should let us find non-price advantages, like quality and service. I have theories as to where the problems lie, but it seems so wild to me that this 50-year-old problem hasn't been licked.
Maybe the truth somehow lies more along the path of antiquated ecosystems leading to too-lenient customers, the way the space launch industry could allow itself to be incredibly wasteful until SpaceX came along.
All I had is poor quality and magnitude more expensive.
Oh and lead times. It feels like the west is now decades behind China when it comes to high tech.