This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand).

You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.

The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.

The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.

▲

arjie an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I admire Chinese industry quite a bit myself, though I haven't yet completed my pilgrimage to Shenzhen. Just a quick clarification about the healthcare plans, though. As a single-person LLC I'm able to get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente plan here in SF. It's not super cheap or anything but it's there.

	▲	dpark an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t know about health care but a lot of stuff in the US is set up for megacorps and individuals but nothing in between. As an individual you can easily get a self funded 401k plan. As a small business you basically can’t. Of course the US still biases towards megacorps who get to do things like distribute dividends taxed at capital gains rates instead of ordinary income like sole proprietorships.

▲

robertlagrant an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very interesting! How are those garages coordinated? Who designs and who commissions?

▲

AnotherGoodName an hour ago | parent [-]

There's 'sourcing agents' whose job is to coordinate the garages. They don't work for any of the garages but as a westerner you'll get in touch with the "electric motor guy" who knows all the factories to contact for that particular purpose. They'll meet you at the airport gate and you essentially pay them as a guide to negotiate the shanghai business environment.

	▲	vpcs111fm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yay and nay. That's only for very small manufacturing stuff. To assure the quality control and lower the price, it will eventually head to the large scale factory. The difference between what happened before and now is that, the minimum order quantity has gotten so low (thanks to CNC and computerization etc), now bigger factories can even handle MOQ down to 100. I would advise you against going to those smaller factories -- QC is a nightmakre. Problems will arise. When you go to Canton fair or Yiwu for trade shows, I always, always, always recommend you to make a factory visit, and for the first batch, have a reliable Chinese person you trust to fly there and do the QC (if you hire someone that you barely know for QC, the other side might just bribe him off) and you will end up getting garbage when it gets to Long Beach port.

▲

kjkjadksj 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Certain industries such as film adjacent industries definitely remind me of what you are describing. Small scale, small shop, profound expertise, able to immediately work and iterate. And the way they solve healthcare is simple. They don’t offer health insurance benefits at all. Employees buy it for themselves from Covered California.