“Designed by Apple in California ” is the boast on the box of every new iPad or Macbook. That the slogan says ‘designed’ rather than ‘made’ says everything about how manufacturing has fled the United States.
Last year the New York Times looked at Apple’s overseas manufacturing operations, pointing out that even if Apple wanted to make their product in the the US many of the necessary skills and infrastructure have been lost.
Now the US is facing the problem that Asian countries are looking at moving up the intellectual property food chain and doing their own designs.
In some ways this is expected as it’s exactly what Japan did with both the consumer electronics and car industries during the 1960s and 70s.
The big difference is that Japanese manufacturers travelled to the US and Europe to study the design and manufacturing methods of the world’s leading companies. In the 1990s and 2000s, the world’s leading companies gave their future competitors the skills through outsourcing and offshoring.
In the next decade we’ll see the latest consumer products coming with labels reading “Designed by Lenovo in Fujian” or “Developed by Samsung in Gyeonggi”.
For western countries, the question is what do we want to be proudly be putting our names to?
Image from Kristajo via SXC.HU
I feel sorry for the other western countries because Australian has already answered that question this year; “mining and residential house construction”.
What could possibly go wrong?
Absolutely nothing – it’s worked for over thirty years.