Comment by protocolture

1 day ago

Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items.

Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.

There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U

  • Lots of that design can be fairly easily automated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwzz-96WliU. And that's without all the "fancy" robotics like arms and so on that is only dropping in price and rising in usability.

    Factory automation design as a service is already a huge sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget will go up, but the unit price might not. It remains to be seen how far into the low-end, low-volume, high-SKU-count that process will reach. Maybe things like standard-ish robotic cells will allow agility in the factory. If being able to make one-off parts in a highly data-driven factory is Industry 4.0, maybe that's Industry 5.0!

    Presumably it will become less possible to spin up production of, say, a whole new design of a speaker in a few days with some new tasks for the workers and some rejigging of basic machines, but it sounds like a sector that will see some interesting progress in the next 50 years.

    • Thats a nice video, thanks for sharing. Everything shown there is old school automation of which China has a whole ecosystem for years. ALso they did they deliberately show only 1-3 steps of the process? Wheres the rest of the speaker? My video showed the speaker production from magnet to packaged box. I'm not convinced that there is a cost advantage yet since all of that technology shown existed in spades for years and yet my modern video shows people are still making speakers by hand. But it is making me think that maybe they can pull it off eventually. (Maybe the US can as well)

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  • India will gladly accept those factories for a few decades.

    • If that's true then why hasn't India changed government policy to make it a more attractive location for manufacturing?

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It really just depends. There might short/small runs which are easily automated, and there might be a large scale production which are not and need hand assembly. The very same product might see both during production – fully automated robots and hand assembly etc.