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Technology Stocks : Semi Equipment Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Ox who wrote (85540)	8/25/2020 5:38:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95479

Not quite true. China imports a lot of iPhone components, but manufactures some of the items themselves. The specific item that I was talking about was a precision screw that apparently others could not make. There were also some other components. The same was true for some LV bags. There are articles on the details which you can dig up if you are interested. In addition to the manufacturing, the infrastructure and supply chain is also very important. Vietnam has been the main beneficiary as they are closer enough to and integrated enough with China to reap the benefits while offering lower cost labor. But I've heard that Vietnam is now pretty saturated. I have a Chinese friend who lives in NYC and manufactures some high end award winning pet supplies. We used to be business partners until we parted ways (on very good terms as it was her passion and was only a side gig for me). So I am intimately aware of the manufacturing challenges that one may face, at least for small businesses. When we started out, we wanted to design in the US and subcontract to China for manufacturing. It did not work. We hired local agents in China to do QA. It did not work. We bought a small shop to manufacture the goods ourselves. It only worked if we were there, requiring weekly or bi-weekly trips to HK and China. So it did not work. We moved it to NYC. Finding the right people, figuring out the tooling, optimizing the process, etc took a long time. Adjusting these for new products and designs proved to take longer than we had expected. Finding qualified people who would actually show up to work on time and do good job was much harder than you can imagine. Now everything is working well and change management and processes are well honed. But it took years to get there. When you watch open heart surgery on The Discovery Channel it looks so simple. The surgeon just cuts layer by layer and folds the muscles on the side while the nurses put clamps on the right places. There is never any blood gushing around. It all looks so simple and neat. But it took that surgeon and his team years of experience to get there. And this is so even though the design of humans and knifes has not changed. Manufacturing is similar. It looks simple in the films. But it is not. And it takes even longer to figure out to handle frequent retooling and design changes.