How many people does it take to make 9 million Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphones?
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
South Korea is an economic miracle. Back in 1985 I ran out of money half-way through college and enlisted in the US Army for the college fund (plus they repaid my existing student loans, which was a nice deal). I got stationed in S. Korea and became friends with a number of KATUSA soldiers. KATUSA stood for Korean Augmentation to the US Army, and was mostly college students fulfilling their service requirement.
Quite a few of my KATUSA friends were engineering students like myself. They told me that the average starting salary for an engineer was $400 / month. So when I see that 25 years later, the average factory worker is making 5 times that amount, it's truly stunning.
As a side note, when I was there, most of the cars on the road were new. It wasn't because everyone could afford to ditch their old cars and buy new ones. It was because prior to that period, not many people could to afford to buy any car, so there simply weren't many old ones.
And their products were crap. Buy a TV, VCR, or other electronic device, and they often failed out of the box. Pop open the hood of a Korean car and you half expected to see a squirrel on a tread mill. But they keep plugging away, improving quality, and growing their markets. Today, I buy Korean products with confidence.
People talks about the rise of China, but to me, with factory salaries at $2000/month, South Korea is the more impressive success story in the developing world.
And China seems to be in more or less the same position that Korea was under Park[1]. Of course, China has this huge hinterland that wasn't there in South Korea, and there's nothing saying that China's political evolution will look like South Korea's (hopefully it won't look like Japan's). But its engaging in almost exactly the same sort of export led growth under an authoritarian government.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Republic_of_South_Korea
Exactly. China can't solely depend on export for its growth, like South Korea did. That will make its development quite a bit slower, not to mention more difficult. Parts of the country will become developed first (this has already significantly happened in Beijing and Shanghai), and then bring the rest of the country up. In the process, there will be significant economic disparities, which has the potential to rupture the social fabric.
[2] The town Taking on China http://bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hn6l8
I'm curious: what's wrong with Japanese politics?
The ExtremeTech article makes a lot of calculations based on the assumption that Samsung assembles the Galaxy S3 itself, but they don't provide any evidence of that.
We'd also be able to more easily supervise working conditions, which may explain why Mexico is not used for this kind of labor.
You should also note that with NAFTA in place, there has been significant shifts of manufacturing to Mexico. A lot of car factories sprung up in Mexico after NAFTA (both brand new factories, as well as relocated from Canada/US). While the degree of work being done in Mexico is not as large as in China, it is not fair to say that none as happened. There's a decent business week article that gives some overview of whats going on down there.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_13/b40770009...
When I worked for a big electronics multinational, we had a plant in one of the Mexican maquiladoras. Management wanted to expand operations there, but the problem at the time was that the power grid and water supply in the area weren't sufficient.
The factory I visited was nice, the working conditions were safe and clean, employees had a straight 40-hour work week, and the atmosphere was friendly and relaxed. But according to the plant manager, there was really high turnover. This wasn't a sweat shop, the pay was good, and they weren't any chemicals or other hazardous materials - conditions you often read about regarding the high turnover in maquiladoras. Whatever the reason, it's really hard to run an operation when you lose the majority of your trained workers every year.