Insourcing Manufacturing
The March 2011 Wired magazine article identifies a new trend in manufacturing: insourcing. An MFG.com survey found that 19% of companies had brought all or part of their manufacturing back to North America. US manufacturing added 136,000 jobs in 2010, the first increase since 1997.
While many small to medium sized businesses moved their manufacturing to China in the early part of the last decade, many are finding benefits from moving production back to the USA:
- Rising labor costs in China are making the USA more cost competitive. China wages more than doubled between 2002-2008.
- Sheer distance “remains an intractable problem.”
