Two reasons: Because when researched and managed properly you can still get a quality product at much lower costs. It just requires more effort on your part (a

Two reasons: Because when researched and managed properly you can still get a quality product at much lower costs. It just requires more effort on your part (a decent supply chain department that does their research and manages the risks, mobilizing an appropriate team in country and all the costs associated with that, which may or may not end up working out more). I'm not from the US but we (Australia) have similar issues here. At the moment I work on projects with fabrication of big steel structures with high quality requirements, design once, build three or four slightly the same. So maybe take what I say next about manufacturing (design once, build millions) with a grain of salt. Chinese manufactures can do things that no one else can. There was a blog around 12 months ago where a group of MIT students went to Shenzhen. This quote stood out to me and really summed up the situation for me. "In an interesting twist, the factory boss suggested that we could build the precision molding tools in China and then send these tools to a US shop for running production. Due to our requirement for clean-room processing, he thought it would be cheaper to run production in the US -- but the US shops didn't have the expertise or capability that his shop in China had to produce the tools; and even if they did, they couldn't touch his cost for such value-added services." http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2014/09/01/shenzhen-trip-r.html http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2014/09/01/shenzhen-trip-r.html