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Non-Tech : Kirk's Market Thoughts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy who wrote (23777)	4/2/2025 3:40:52 PM
From: Kirk ©	Respond to of 26439

Maybe for some like Apple but not for the components group of HP that is now AVGO/Broadcom. I thought the absolute biggest driver of US manufacturing moving to China was labor cost. When I started as a summer intern in 1978, we did most assembly of chips we built on site (on 2-inch wafers that we upgraded to 3") into plastic and hermetic packages. The assembly line was mostly recent immigrants from Mexico and the Philippines. Those were really good jobs that helped their families move up. By the time I left 20 years later, those assembly jobs were sent to Singapore, I was tasked with training Singapore engineers (rather than MIT, Stanford and CAL) engineers to do R&D, and we were shutting down the 3" wafer fab to build products in other states and countries that didn't have the 9.7% CA sales tax on new wafer fab equipment. I argued for sending our manufacturing line and the associated brand new R&D team to Baja Mexico to have the same time zone, far easier travel AND it would help a neighbor country improve the status of their people thus taking pressure off illegal immigration. I was told the tax savings we got for sending these jobs to Singapore from their government were worth MORE than the total revenue of the product line we were sending over. Singapore labor was actually very expensive because as soon as we trained someone good to run R&D and/or manufacturing, they'd leave and start their own firms to compete. That is why China wanted Tesla... to steal Musk's technology to build their own cars even cheaper.