Bringing Manufacturing back to the UK

[NinOz]

I'm sorry but the link you give to the MIT opinion piece starts with "Donald Trump says" and it is published by a left wing academic institute in the middle of an election year. 

You think Apple gave then such commercially sensitive numbers, or do you think they cooked them up.

What do I care, I merely posted a correction to your incorrect interpretation of the basis of the article.

Why so disparaging and dismissive?  Could it be a personal political bias shining through?
Got any real data to back your assertions?
Or does innuendo defeat information.

Personally I would put more credence to an MIT review by qualified persons than that of an armchair expert.

CFJ

[Bealman]

Let's keep this interesting (but as Deserthound says, emotive) thread on a friendly footing, folks. 

[woodbury22uk]

For a few years in the early part of this decade Oxford Diecast regularly used to state that their long term objective on production was to return it to the UK, having been the last large volume diecast producer to have manufactured here before setting up their own factory in China. I noticed that this statement has been absent for the past few years.

I think that our Western economies have not coped well with the automation and mechanisation of manual work which has left a cross-section of the population in a wilderness devoid of suitable employment. Similarly precision assembly of small components has been largely automated, and, for example, building a car is about joining together big precision sub-assemblies. This has excluded another tranche of people from the precision assembly work. Right now the low wage Chinese economy is in transition which will see/is seeing its precision assembly work outsourced to lower wage markets, either by the Chinese owners themselves or by companies further up the chain of supply.

There is an impression that the work which has been lost in western manufacturing can be brought back and still compete in the western mass markets. I doubt that will be the case, because the lost work will not be done by people. Making our toy trains here will not create mass employment to serve a mass market. Rather, by design, we will find ways of making precision objects with the minimum of human intervention to serve a specialist market with much higher prices. At least I hope I will not have to re-solder the pick-up wires on almost every Dapol Mk3 coach where the variable hand soldered connections have failed.

[Chris Morris]

For companies like Dapol (no connection with me) I am sure that dealing with Chinese manufacturers who are much larger than them is a pain. There is inconsistent quality, you are given a production time slot in the factory that might not suit you, shipment takes about eight weeks and they don't always make exactly what you want in the quantities you want.
It therefore follows that having items made in the uk would be preferable to China if it was possible.
Conclusion: as things stand today China must still be quite a big better on total cost for model railway manufacture than the UK.

[Snowwolflair]

I'm sorry but the link you give to the MIT opinion piece starts with "Donald Trump says" and it is published by a left wing academic institute in the middle of an election year. 

You think Apple gave then such commercially sensitive numbers, or do you think they cooked them up.

What do I care, I merely posted a correction to your incorrect interpretation of the basis of the article.

Why so disparaging and dismissive?  Could it be a personal political bias shining through?
Got any real data to back your assertions?
Or does innuendo defeat information.

Personally I would put more credence to an MIT review by qualified persons than that of an armchair expert.

CFJ

NinOz

As Bealman says keeping it civil.

With reference to "armchair experts".

I have run factories in China, I suspect neither you or the economists at MIT have.

So I guess that makes me the qualified person.

[geoffc]

One thing has not been mentioned in this debate, Balance of Payments, many years ago at the end of each month the BBC News issued the figures for that month. In those days we had a manufacturing industry very much larger than today which was left to decay as the financial sector was seen by some to be our saviour , we all know what happened there. Today most of our manufacturing industry has gone and most of what remains is owned by overseas companies and a very large percentage of goods that we buy is imported, much of it from China. Today we never hear about the Balance of Payments which must be a larger deficit than years ago, the result is that the country hemorrhages money every month as we spend more on imports than we earn on exports.

Geoff

[Snowwolflair]

NinOz

With regard to

Why so disparaging and dismissive?  Could it be a personal political bias shining through?

I could express and opinion about a certain  gentleman, and frankly all the rest of his ilk  but the bad language filter on the Forum would overheat 

I am strictly non political, but I am aware to the games they all play as I deal every day with their type.

[longbow]

So I guess that makes me the qualified person

I'd say the qualified person here is Mike from Revolution Trains, who is actually in the business of making model trains.

[TylerB]

To put a purely selfish spin on it, what do you think it would do to the delay in new models being issued if manufacturing switched to the UK from China?

It wouldn't be a case of just switching off the production line in China on Friday and restarting it in Britain on Monday, there would be all the tooling to re-import, the factory to set up. specialised staff to be recruited and trained, test runs to iron out problems, supply chains... not to mention the issue of the old factory not caring about the quality of the product line if it knew it's contract was coming to the end (this is not a criticism of China by the way, I think this would be the case anywhere if you told them their services are no longer required). And modern models contain a multitude of components so would there still be a need for a fair number of components to be sourced abroad?

Whatever the comparative costs of manufacturing, the switch-over would be immensely expensive, and I reckon it would slow down the release of new stuff by a year at least. There would also be an inevitable quality loss over the transition period.

Look at how long Farish took to get properly going again once Bachmann took over, and that was just with the relatively (by modern standards) unsophisticated product being made at that time

[Snowwolflair]

So I guess that makes me the qualified person

I'd say the qualified person here is Mike from Revolution Trains, who is actually in the business of making model trains.

I don't disagree with that but its Rapido Trains Inc. that are doing the factory interface and who are passing on their understanding, I suspect commercially filtered, second hand.

As I said I suspect Rapido Trains (I need to correct my earlier post) will find that given the new protectionism in America they will eventually conclude bringing their manufacturing back to the US is the thing to do.  Not now but soon if it keeps going the way it is.  After all he is making enough volume to justify it.

[red_death]

I don't disagree with that but its Rapido Trains Inc. that are doing the factory interface and who are passing on their understanding, I suspect commercially filtered, second hand.

As I said I suspect Rapido Trains (I need to correct my earlier post) will find that given the new protectionism in America they will eventually conclude bringing their manufacturing back to the US is the thing to do.  Not now but soon if it keeps going the way it is.  After all he is making enough volume to justify it.

Sorry to disappoint you but we deal direct with factories on two projects (plus we trust Rapido and talk to a lot of the other small manufacturers dealing with the same or similar factories).

If you read Rapido's recent newsletter they addressed the issue of bringing back manufacturing to N America and they are terrified by the prospect for similar reasons to us - lack of skills at a price the market will pay.

On a wider issue raised by TylerB and DesertHound - I'm not so sceptical about the size of the market, where there has been a significant change is that the manufacturers have covered the obvious go everywhere models eg class 37 or 47 or a black 5.  Those are the sorts of things you knock out by the 1000s. So new models are almost by definition more restricted in appeal and therefore you need to start looking at smaller volumes.  The other issue is that companies are trying to be more efficient in holding less or no stock (ie less cash tied up) but that means models aren't sitting in stock 12 months of the year.

Cheers, Mike

[Snowwolflair]

Only time will tell 

[woodbury22uk]

So I guess that makes me the qualified person

I'd say the qualified person here is Mike from Revolution Trains, who is actually in the business of making model trains.

As I said I suspect Rapido Trains (I need to correct my earlier post) will find that given the new protectionism in America they will eventually conclude bringing their manufacturing back to the US is the thing to do.  Not now but soon if it keeps going the way it is.  After all he is making enough volume to justify it.

I think Rapido might choose Canada rather than the US for manufacturing, otherwise as a Canadian based company they would still risk dealing at arm's length with the "off-shore" manufacturer. I am not sure that they ever manufactured in the US.

[Snowwolflair]

So I guess that makes me the qualified person

I'd say the qualified person here is Mike from Revolution Trains, who is actually in the business of making model trains.

As I said I suspect Rapido Trains (I need to correct my earlier post) will find that given the new protectionism in America they will eventually conclude bringing their manufacturing back to the US is the thing to do.  Not now but soon if it keeps going the way it is.  After all he is making enough volume to justify it.

I think Rapido might choose Canada rather than the US for manufacturing, otherwise as a Canadian based company they would still risk dealing at arm's length with the "off-shore" manufacturer. I am not sure that they ever manufactured in the US.

Good point but they are inside NAFTA so i'm not sure how that would affect them.

[railsquid]

So, what does this mean, and how does it tie into production in China vs. the UK? Given my thoughts on the above, I too believe that the hobby will become more specialist, as eluded to by TylerB. If it becomes more specialist then I believe production and many things related to it will gravitate towards where the customer base is - or at least towards a location which also has a customer base (in our hobby that would be Japan, Germany, Switzerland etc. where the industry will, I imagine, be going through, or go though in the future, the same changes as the UK).

Japan is a bit of a different case, sure there's a demographic problem (fewer children) but it's an incredibly train-orientated country and despite being full of gadgets  I have yet to hear any serious worries about "the future of the hobby". Moreover it's retained a substantial portion of its model manufacturing capability and I think in the longer term it will be easier to bring back production from overseas if necessary (except maybe for MicroAce who have already had their hand burnt once in China).