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One option is contract manufacturing - which avoids the need for you to set up your own factory and hire your own employees. At least in the electronics sector

One option is contract manufacturing - which avoids the need for you to set up your own factory and hire your own employees. At least in the electronics sector, there are contract manufacturers in the west that are happy to deal with small-to-medium-volume production runs. Their websites will sometimes make them sound a bit aloof, making out they're big and high tech and expensive, but that's just marketing. If an electronics contract manufacturer says they work in aerospace, defence and security, medical, oil and gas and their website has photos of jet fighters and operating theatres? What they really mean is they're set up for production runs as small as a few hundred items, they're happy to deal with a bit of bureaucracy on your end, and they'll guarantee they won't cut corners (like substituting components with cheaper or more easily available ones) unless you tell them to. A catch, of course, is the minimum orders involved. Automated assembly machines may have the same running costs regardless of the wages of the country they're in - but those machines need to be set up and reconfigured when changing between orders. I don't know what wizardry lets PCBWay offer surface mount PCB assembly for $30 for 20 boards, but you can't match it while paying western skilled worker wages. So if you ask a western contract manufacturer for <300 boards, the price will be substantially more expensive than Chinese manufacturing.

tomjen3 2y ago
I imagine the wizardry is an industrial robot and some custom software
- pjc50 2y ago
  > surface mount PCB assembly for $30 for 20 boards Often uneconomical to set up pick and place for just 20 boards. Quite often the wizardry is a little middle-aged Chinese lady who wields a vacuum tweezer like a chopstick, from 9am to 9pm six days a week.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Manual assembly is indeed a common practice. But it's skilled work, so it'll be paying skilled wages. And you need an inspection step - especially if you're working with BGAs and other difficult components. Presumably for $30 they're shipping out boards without doing a power-on test - which makes visual/x-ray inspection even more important. And even when the assembly is manual, you've still got to get the right parts to the right assembly station at the right time. Can't be putting in a 5% 10k 0805 resistor if the design calls for 1%. Even with manual assembly, if they're making a profit at the prices they're charging they must be running a very efficient operation indeed.
  - tomjen3 2y ago
    Thats where the custom software comes in - you can program a robot to move in a pattern through setting it or through sending coordinates to it (I have done that as part of a job). You could have software that converts the instructions for the PCB into instructions for the robot to do pick and place.
- krisoft 2y ago
  It is probably not the full answer. I think they are just willing to go the extra mile for what we here in the west would consider "not much money". Just few weeks ago I ordered my first design from pcbway. (Both first order from them, and the first PCB I ever designed.) Turns out I was a muppet and made multiple mistakes with my component footprints/selection. One of the connectors just simply didn't fit, the other connector was colliding with a resistor and an IC next to it. Complete shambles and absolutely my mistake. They were super nice about it. Sent a detailed excel sheet with photos and arrows on the photos illustrating the problems. The sheet had detailed english description of what is wrong and they even had suggestion how they could "bodge" things to still get it working as well as they can given my design mistakes. We exchanged emails about options and eventually figured out the best way to do it. They did as good a job as they could with my faulty design and now I'm a happy owner of the assembled PCBs. The whole thing cost $85 for my five boards, components, and assembly. (I think shipping was not included in that price.) Which is "not a lot of money" where I am , and I would certainly not go to this much trouble for that much. What I'm saying with this story is that "industrial robot and some custom software" doesn't get you this part of the service. Where someone messages you back and forth to figure out how to salvage the poxy design sent by someone incompetent like me.
  - Danieru 2y ago
    Sounds like the classic strategy of good-customer-service. 85$ is not a lot of money in China either. Double so for English speaking help. Triple so when you get assembled PCBs at the end. The theory I've heard is that where American business culture prioritizes profit, Chinese businesses are chasing market share. Thus you get combinations like Rumba and Kin Yat. Roomba subcontracts all manufacturing to China, earns incredible gross margins, while the Chinese manufacturer is free to make competitors. In time the competitors tech reaches and exceeds the original. Now Roomba is left with low/mid tier product lines and Chinese companies control the majority market share. Great while it lasted. Lots of profits for over a decade. The profit maxing strategy just lacks a future.
    - pphysch 2y ago
      > The profit maxing strategy just lacks a future. That's pretty much it. The best way to make a strict "profit" in many cases is to buy large messy bundles of assets/debts (companies), destroy the integration, and sell off the individual assets; that is, the private equity playbook. But destroying is easy, building is hard.

tomjen3 2y ago

I imagine the wizardry is an industrial robot and some custom software

pjc50 2y ago
> surface mount PCB assembly for $30 for 20 boards Often uneconomical to set up pick and place for just 20 boards. Quite often the wizardry is a little middle-aged Chinese lady who wields a vacuum tweezer like a chopstick, from 9am to 9pm six days a week.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Manual assembly is indeed a common practice. But it's skilled work, so it'll be paying skilled wages. And you need an inspection step - especially if you're working with BGAs and other difficult components. Presumably for $30 they're shipping out boards without doing a power-on test - which makes visual/x-ray inspection even more important. And even when the assembly is manual, you've still got to get the right parts to the right assembly station at the right time. Can't be putting in a 5% 10k 0805 resistor if the design calls for 1%. Even with manual assembly, if they're making a profit at the prices they're charging they must be running a very efficient operation indeed.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Thats where the custom software comes in - you can program a robot to move in a pattern through setting it or through sending coordinates to it (I have done that as part of a job). You could have software that converts the instructions for the PCB into instructions for the robot to do pick and place.
krisoft 2y ago
It is probably not the full answer. I think they are just willing to go the extra mile for what we here in the west would consider "not much money". Just few weeks ago I ordered my first design from pcbway. (Both first order from them, and the first PCB I ever designed.) Turns out I was a muppet and made multiple mistakes with my component footprints/selection. One of the connectors just simply didn't fit, the other connector was colliding with a resistor and an IC next to it. Complete shambles and absolutely my mistake. They were super nice about it. Sent a detailed excel sheet with photos and arrows on the photos illustrating the problems. The sheet had detailed english description of what is wrong and they even had suggestion how they could "bodge" things to still get it working as well as they can given my design mistakes. We exchanged emails about options and eventually figured out the best way to do it. They did as good a job as they could with my faulty design and now I'm a happy owner of the assembled PCBs. The whole thing cost $85 for my five boards, components, and assembly. (I think shipping was not included in that price.) Which is "not a lot of money" where I am , and I would certainly not go to this much trouble for that much. What I'm saying with this story is that "industrial robot and some custom software" doesn't get you this part of the service. Where someone messages you back and forth to figure out how to salvage the poxy design sent by someone incompetent like me.
- Danieru 2y ago
  Sounds like the classic strategy of good-customer-service. 85$ is not a lot of money in China either. Double so for English speaking help. Triple so when you get assembled PCBs at the end. The theory I've heard is that where American business culture prioritizes profit, Chinese businesses are chasing market share. Thus you get combinations like Rumba and Kin Yat. Roomba subcontracts all manufacturing to China, earns incredible gross margins, while the Chinese manufacturer is free to make competitors. In time the competitors tech reaches and exceeds the original. Now Roomba is left with low/mid tier product lines and Chinese companies control the majority market share. Great while it lasted. Lots of profits for over a decade. The profit maxing strategy just lacks a future.
  - pphysch 2y ago
    > The profit maxing strategy just lacks a future. That's pretty much it. The best way to make a strict "profit" in many cases is to buy large messy bundles of assets/debts (companies), destroy the integration, and sell off the individual assets; that is, the private equity playbook. But destroying is easy, building is hard.