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This looks so amazing and I wasn't aware that Playstations are still manufactured in Sony's home country itself. I guess automation helps in keeping the manufac

This looks so amazing and I wasn't aware that Playstations are still manufactured in Sony's home country itself. I guess automation helps in keeping the manufacturing cost low. Now I am intrigued about what high selling electronic devices are manufactured in their home country itself and not by the ODMs/CMs in countries with cheap labour like China.

hobofan 6y ago
To me it's almost more surprising that with that high degree of automation they are not splitting the factory up into smaller ones and building them per-continent.
- actuator 6y ago
  They will still need to ship the parts which depending on the part might be coming from SK/Taiwan/China but I guess they can still reap the benefit of probably reduced taxes because of local assembly.
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    Not necessarily. All components can be made by Japanese companies. Whether Sony uses a Japanese supplier or a company from the other countries you mentioned is a matter of the production volume and which supplier makes the best offer.
- jbob2000 6y ago
  Electronics are fairly light, you probably don’t save much by shipping raw/incomplete products to the consuming country for final assembly. It’s not like soft drinks, where you want to bottle them close to the point of consumption so you aren’t shipping the dead weight of water around.
  - dfox 6y ago
    Also shipping the manufacturing/automation technology is not particularly cheap, not to mention the amount of on-site setup/calibration that would be required.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      And on-going operations, troubleshooting, remediation, upgrades, etc. I either ship my teams out there on the regualar, or else hire locals. And that leads to questions of intellectual property leaks, security holes, fraud & waste, etc.
- DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  I'm an industrial engineer, so I geek out about this type of stuff. Shipping stuff is pretty cheap, but distributing the supply chain and creating multiple factories making the same product is incredibly expensive. Let's say you have a hard drive supplier. Now rather than the supplier shipping to 1 factory, there are 5. Freight rates are going to be higher because you have a lower volume. Increased demand on one continent means you need the right balance of material going to that factory rather than simply upping the order for your single factory. Incorrect sales forecasts now mean you have inventory in Europe but need it in the US. You either need to pay to move it, try to get your suppliers to reroute things (always for a fee), or build finished units and ship them to the US, potentially facing higher tariffs than shipping in components [1]. Inventory costs are higher while you figure this all out, and you have increased logistics costs. You're paying a (bigger) team of people to manage this, and expediting shipments as needed (likely at 3-10x normal cost depending on how expedited, market demand for shipping, etc). Then there's product consistency. Even if you order identical equipment and keep all the same suppliers, you'll have different issues at each facility. Sharing best practices around the world is challengings and frequently done poorly. [2] Then you have tariffs and government regulations. If you were 0.25% of GDP for a country, you can go to the government and lobby harder than if you're 0.05% of GDP in 5 different countries. [3] -- [1] https://hts.usitc.gov/current https://hts.usitc.gov/current offers some light trading if you want to find tariffs for the US. They're incredibly detailed, and the smallest difference could change from a 2% tariff to 60%. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax is also interesting. [2] I know of a distributed manufacturing setup where two "identical" factories have significantly different quality outputs. The best rationale they've come up with is a difference in altitude and climate. Corporations who have distributed manufacturing like this often have a corporate team who travel between locations checking how well locations are adhering to the company defined best practices. [3] Definitely don't discount this step! I've worked for 4 manufacturers professionally, and I know for a fact 3 of them have pushed for tariffs and exemptions from regulations. #4 likely did too, but I don't have a specific example in mind. In each case, the difference in profits were 7 or 8 digits long.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    Thanks for the response! A lot of interesting points I hadn't considered! For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope. For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?
mytailorisrich 6y ago
I have a feeling that automation slowed down in many sectors when China came "online". I think this cycle is coming to an end, and there is no comparable pool of labour anywhere in the world so that fully automated factories are going to be the next step (that wasn't technically possible in the early 90s but I think we now have the technology or very close to).
- xvilka 6y ago
  In fact China drives automation these days. And its speeding up everywhere.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  " there is no comparable pool of labour anywhere in the world " -> this is not fully true, as when wages in China started to rise, lots of labor offshoring moved to SE Asia (e.g. Vietnam) and there's still a lot of potential for the same to happen in various African countries.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    There are pools of cheap-ish labour but none comparable to China. They are much smaller and many, like Africa, are not able to take this on now.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      You made a prediction that these places will never be comparable to China. What do you base this on? What prevents India and African countries from establishing special economic zones that are attractive to foreign investors?
- walrus01 6y ago
  > I have a feeling that automation slowed down in many sectors when China came "online". The largest high quality AC to DC power supply manufacturers used to all be Taiwanese companies. And they manufactured in Taiwan. At some point about twenty years ago with increasing wages, benefits and cost of living in Taiwan they started looking seriously at opening factories in mainland China and other places. Delta, for instance, has a big factory in a low-wage-area of Thailand. Now instead of going for full robotic automation and continuing to make power supplies in Taiwan, most of them are made by more manual labor intensive processes in places with much lower wages. The top ten Taiwanese x86 motherboard manufacturers also did the same.
jbay808 6y ago
A motor company I know of makes their small-runs, specialty, and high performance motors in Japan and the rest in Indonesia. However they recently switched to a fully automated, lights-off factory in Japan to make their new product lines.
- barrenko 6y ago
  What does lights-off mean?
  - nickff 6y ago
    It means there are no people involved in the assembly process; you can run the manufacturing line with the 'lights off'.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
dfox 6y ago
Japan always had its “peculiar” approach to electronics manufacturing automation. While rest of the world tries very hard do design out any kind of “fiddly” steps, Japanese manufacturers got very good at automating such things. Just look at any kind of Japanese home AV gear with its typical large single sided boards full of obviously robot placed jumper links and thru hole components.
- enchiridion 6y ago
  A piece of wisdom I decided to follow recently. If you are entering a new hobby, buy Japanese for the best value/price ratio. Served me well when buying a guitar and amp. Can anyone else support this? Does the type of manufacturing outlined above play an important role?
  - raviisoccupied 6y ago
    Out of interest, what music gear did you purchase, and how did you find it? I'm currently looking to expand my guitar collection (from 1 to 2!)
    - enchiridion 6y ago
      Yamaha Pacifica (311 or better, 112 is good enough, but for about $100 more you get a lot of nice little add-ons) and the Yamaha THR10ii modeling amp. The Pacifica was a bit hard to find. I think the next batch is shipping in early August from what I can tell. r/guitar and r/guitarlessons are good resources.
cbmuser 6y ago
PlayStations are manufactured by different companies. Some are made by Sony EMCS, some by Foxconn and so on. Whether the PlayStation company let's them manufacture by one of Sony's own OEMs or a third party company is usually a matter of which OEM has the best offer. Sony normally uses their own OEMs for the first batches, for low-volume products and for domestic products.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rodgerd 6y ago
Cameras. There's a split within (the dwindling pool of) camera manufacturers about what they'll build in Japan/Germany and what they'll outsource, and where they'll outsource it to. So you have, say, Olympus designing some lenses, software, and bodies, outsourcing some lens design (probably to Sigma - it's something of a closely guarded secret, although it seems all the major camera companies outsource at least some of their lens designs), outsource some of their manufacturing to other countries, while some remains in Japan. As to why, check out Yongnou's EF-mount 50/1.8 and 35/2 lenses and you'll see why Japanese manufacturers want to keep their designs as far away from China as they can.
- actuator 6y ago
  This seems interesting. I checked and it seems Sigma makes everything in Japan. Amusingly enough all the well selling digital camera manufacturers(Fujifilm, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Olympus) are Japanese.

hobofan 6y ago

To me it's almost more surprising that with that high degree of automation they are not splitting the factory up into smaller ones and building them per-continent.

actuator 6y ago
They will still need to ship the parts which depending on the part might be coming from SK/Taiwan/China but I guess they can still reap the benefit of probably reduced taxes because of local assembly.
- cbmuser 6y ago
  Not necessarily. All components can be made by Japanese companies. Whether Sony uses a Japanese supplier or a company from the other countries you mentioned is a matter of the production volume and which supplier makes the best offer.
jbob2000 6y ago
Electronics are fairly light, you probably don’t save much by shipping raw/incomplete products to the consuming country for final assembly. It’s not like soft drinks, where you want to bottle them close to the point of consumption so you aren’t shipping the dead weight of water around.
- dfox 6y ago
  Also shipping the manufacturing/automation technology is not particularly cheap, not to mention the amount of on-site setup/calibration that would be required.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    And on-going operations, troubleshooting, remediation, upgrades, etc. I either ship my teams out there on the regualar, or else hire locals. And that leads to questions of intellectual property leaks, security holes, fraud & waste, etc.
DavidPeiffer 6y ago
I'm an industrial engineer, so I geek out about this type of stuff. Shipping stuff is pretty cheap, but distributing the supply chain and creating multiple factories making the same product is incredibly expensive. Let's say you have a hard drive supplier. Now rather than the supplier shipping to 1 factory, there are 5. Freight rates are going to be higher because you have a lower volume. Increased demand on one continent means you need the right balance of material going to that factory rather than simply upping the order for your single factory. Incorrect sales forecasts now mean you have inventory in Europe but need it in the US. You either need to pay to move it, try to get your suppliers to reroute things (always for a fee), or build finished units and ship them to the US, potentially facing higher tariffs than shipping in components [1]. Inventory costs are higher while you figure this all out, and you have increased logistics costs. You're paying a (bigger) team of people to manage this, and expediting shipments as needed (likely at 3-10x normal cost depending on how expedited, market demand for shipping, etc). Then there's product consistency. Even if you order identical equipment and keep all the same suppliers, you'll have different issues at each facility. Sharing best practices around the world is challengings and frequently done poorly. [2] Then you have tariffs and government regulations. If you were 0.25% of GDP for a country, you can go to the government and lobby harder than if you're 0.05% of GDP in 5 different countries. [3] -- [1] https://hts.usitc.gov/current https://hts.usitc.gov/current offers some light trading if you want to find tariffs for the US. They're incredibly detailed, and the smallest difference could change from a 2% tariff to 60%. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax is also interesting. [2] I know of a distributed manufacturing setup where two "identical" factories have significantly different quality outputs. The best rationale they've come up with is a difference in altitude and climate. Corporations who have distributed manufacturing like this often have a corporate team who travel between locations checking how well locations are adhering to the company defined best practices. [3] Definitely don't discount this step! I've worked for 4 manufacturers professionally, and I know for a fact 3 of them have pushed for tariffs and exemptions from regulations. #4 likely did too, but I don't have a specific example in mind. In each case, the difference in profits were 7 or 8 digits long.
- hobofan 6y ago
  Thanks for the response! A lot of interesting points I hadn't considered! For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope. For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?

mytailorisrich 6y ago

I have a feeling that automation slowed down in many sectors when China came "online". I think this cycle is coming to an end, and there is no comparable pool of labour anywhere in the world so that fully automated factories are going to be the next step (that wasn't technically possible in the early 90s but I think we now have the technology or very close to).

xvilka 6y ago
In fact China drives automation these days. And its speeding up everywhere.
PeterisP 6y ago
" there is no comparable pool of labour anywhere in the world " -> this is not fully true, as when wages in China started to rise, lots of labor offshoring moved to SE Asia (e.g. Vietnam) and there's still a lot of potential for the same to happen in various African countries.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  There are pools of cheap-ish labour but none comparable to China. They are much smaller and many, like Africa, are not able to take this on now.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    You made a prediction that these places will never be comparable to China. What do you base this on? What prevents India and African countries from establishing special economic zones that are attractive to foreign investors?
walrus01 6y ago
> I have a feeling that automation slowed down in many sectors when China came "online". The largest high quality AC to DC power supply manufacturers used to all be Taiwanese companies. And they manufactured in Taiwan. At some point about twenty years ago with increasing wages, benefits and cost of living in Taiwan they started looking seriously at opening factories in mainland China and other places. Delta, for instance, has a big factory in a low-wage-area of Thailand. Now instead of going for full robotic automation and continuing to make power supplies in Taiwan, most of them are made by more manual labor intensive processes in places with much lower wages. The top ten Taiwanese x86 motherboard manufacturers also did the same.

jbay808 6y ago

A motor company I know of makes their small-runs, specialty, and high performance motors in Japan and the rest in Indonesia. However they recently switched to a fully automated, lights-off factory in Japan to make their new product lines.

barrenko 6y ago
What does lights-off mean?
- nickff 6y ago
  It means there are no people involved in the assembly process; you can run the manufacturing line with the 'lights off'.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

dfox 6y ago

Japan always had its “peculiar” approach to electronics manufacturing automation. While rest of the world tries very hard do design out any kind of “fiddly” steps, Japanese manufacturers got very good at automating such things. Just look at any kind of Japanese home AV gear with its typical large single sided boards full of obviously robot placed jumper links and thru hole components.

enchiridion 6y ago
A piece of wisdom I decided to follow recently. If you are entering a new hobby, buy Japanese for the best value/price ratio. Served me well when buying a guitar and amp. Can anyone else support this? Does the type of manufacturing outlined above play an important role?
- raviisoccupied 6y ago
  Out of interest, what music gear did you purchase, and how did you find it? I'm currently looking to expand my guitar collection (from 1 to 2!)
  - enchiridion 6y ago
    Yamaha Pacifica (311 or better, 112 is good enough, but for about $100 more you get a lot of nice little add-ons) and the Yamaha THR10ii modeling amp. The Pacifica was a bit hard to find. I think the next batch is shipping in early August from what I can tell. r/guitar and r/guitarlessons are good resources.

cbmuser 6y ago

PlayStations are manufactured by different companies. Some are made by Sony EMCS, some by Foxconn and so on. Whether the PlayStation company let's them manufacture by one of Sony's own OEMs or a third party company is usually a matter of which OEM has the best offer. Sony normally uses their own OEMs for the first batches, for low-volume products and for domestic products.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

rodgerd 6y ago

Cameras. There's a split within (the dwindling pool of) camera manufacturers about what they'll build in Japan/Germany and what they'll outsource, and where they'll outsource it to. So you have, say, Olympus designing some lenses, software, and bodies, outsourcing some lens design (probably to Sigma - it's something of a closely guarded secret, although it seems all the major camera companies outsource at least some of their lens designs), outsource some of their manufacturing to other countries, while some remains in Japan. As to why, check out Yongnou's EF-mount 50/1.8 and 35/2 lenses and you'll see why Japanese manufacturers want to keep their designs as far away from China as they can.

actuator 6y ago
This seems interesting. I checked and it seems Sigma makes everything in Japan. Amusingly enough all the well selling digital camera manufacturers(Fujifilm, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Olympus) are Japanese.