This is great news for RPi team and for uk manufacturing. I've been saying for over a year now that if there is a reasonable level of automation then there is no reason why china should be cheaper than the uk.so long as you can maintain a robust supply chain of components (I should think using a sony facility is beneficial to this) then it can work out great.
We priced our product for uk and china and china was infact more expensive because of the way they price plastics. Sometimes UK is best
I completely agree but it's not just wages and taxes.
China has everything they need to bleem out consumer electronics indefinitely. They source the materials within China and they produce [most of] the components in China. It's all there under one currency.
I love England but we don't really have the rare earth metals required to do this stuff. We need to import them and that means paying China more money. Often more money than it would be to have them fab the whole thing in the first place.
I agree that this is something that needs to happen eventually. If the world keeps paying China to make everything they will end up owning us all. On paper they probably already do.
This is true for everything except the actual electronics. There are a handful of fabs for small bits in China, and factories that make discrete components. But almost without exception serious semiconductor manufacture happens elsewhere. To be fair, often that "elsewhere" is Japan, Korea or Taiwan, which are much closer to a Chinese production chain than a British one.
The UK has always depended on import to sustain its industry. Pretty much nothing's changed since it was a colonial empire - it's just that the materials and parts are sourced from independent countries now.
I was surprised to find out that Land Rover outsources the manufacturing of most of the exterior and interior trimming on the mainland, then ships everything for assembly to the UK, for example. The same is probably true for the electronics and most engine parts, as well.
It's very true that if the components are made in china then it is easier to keep your supply chain reliable if you assemble next door and that's a risk of bring assembly back to uk but some other risks (which can be of greater concern) are reduced by shipping components to the uk and then assembling. It all depends what your product uses, there's no longer a one size fits all solution that there seemed to be 10 years ago of "just make it there and ship it back"
> I agree that this is something that needs to happen eventually. If the world keeps paying China to make everything they will end up owning us all. On paper they probably already do.
That's too pessimistic. Broaden your horizon away from the British (and perhaps US) example. The German economy is doing fine for manufacturing, but they have no qualms about importing from China at all.
Manufacturing in the US is also very strong, might even be the highest it's ever been. The, so called, problem is that it doesn't really hire as many people as it used to due to automation.
True, but using unusual words embiggens the chance that your audience might not understand. The only regular use of bleem Google finds is for a PS1 emulator.
I spoke with Raspberry Pi about this for a news story I wrote. They said this about manufacturing: "The temptation is always to push manufacturing to a low-cost region, but I think with the right attention to detail there's no reason British manufacturing can't compete in a global marketplace," Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi foundation told ZDNet UK on Thursday. "It shows that British manufacturing can be competitive."
( http://www.zdnet.com/raspberry-pi-manufacturing-comes-home-a... )
Just a small one, but the Teensy creator was looking into moving manufacturing to the US. I just found out about the Teensy 3.0 on Kickstarter[1] actually, but it doesn't mention anything about the manufacturing.
A lot of professional sound studio gear is still being made in the UK and the US (and has always been. Studio types are very picky about the origin of the gear they are using).
I think people should not be picky about the origin but the quality. If you really care about local manufacturing then making it competitive should be your priority and not charity or warm fuzzy feelings. Tough love and all that.
My employer manufactures high-end electronic goods in the US with a full manufacturing floor. We succeed in part because of aggressive attention to detail, exacting automation and constant improvement.
It also helps that we're not in a price race to the bottom.
Yes, Google "reshoring" for a number of news articles and opinion pieces about how it's happening to some degree and how big of a deal it may or may not be.
Yes, it's actually a White House talking point this week: "Since February 2010, the U.S. manufacturing sector has added roughly 500,000 jobs, the fastest pace of job growth in the sector since 1995".
I think there has been a general recognition that rebuilding local supply chain in manufacturing is essential. Especially in the industries where this is still possible.
Cheap labour only helps if two years of labour is cheaper than a machine that can do the work. The machines get cheaper and labour gets more expensive. It obviously doesn't mean a lot of the low skilled jobs are ever going to return to the countries they have left, but at least it creates opportunity for an ecosystem of local suppliers and innovation.
There's a difference in measuring manufacturing by the number of jobs, the number of widgets created, or the value of the widgets created. The value of the widgets created is at the highest point it's ever been in the US.
There was an article I read about how US manufacturing are making a comeback, but mostly in bespoke manufacturing that requires a lot of automation and technology.
On the other side, there is the story of the man who tried to source all of his solar panel parts in the US. He's actually having difficulty doing this (supply chain issues).
> we had been unable to find a British manufacturer [...] who believed that the project would be enough of a success for them to risk line space for us.
I think that sums up current European attitudes to manufacturing and capitalism all too well, sadly. Note how they eventually ended up with a Welsh factory... owned and run by Sony.
And what does a supposedly business-friendly government do? Worry about building houses. Sigh.
Well, our ageing housing stock, escalating house prices and lack of urban social mobility does warrant focus on housing, the knock on effects for the construction industry also show this as being a sensible economic policy as well as solving an increasing socioeconomic problem.
I'm not sure how using a Welsh factory shows how this government is anti capitalist or anti manufacturing - given that Wales is in the UK and it is the UK government I don't think it matters where it is in the country. The factory is probably based there as a result of the government incentives about a decade to fifteen years ago which were introduced to get large corporations to base operations in areas of Wales who had been relient on the mines and who, at that time, had spiralling unemployment.
Alos, The EU isn't anti manufacturing. Everyone is looking to the German model (high value manufacturing) as they are the only one bucking the downward trend and actually growing. The UK itself still has a very healthy manufacturing sector - I forget the exact figure but it makes up a double digit percentage of our GDP so it is not insignificant at all.
I agree more could be done to improve the position of manufacturing but to look at the Chinese model and say "hey, we should have all the back here" is not the answer. Electronics, chemicals and high end goods we should have but let china make the Barbie Dolls and cheap tat, that's not what we should be aspiring to.
My point was that it's not a British factory: it's a Sony-owned plant that happens to be in the UK at this point in time. Sony is a Japanese-American corporation; all this chest-beating is quite unwarranted.
The point about capitalism is that "Euro" capitalists don't want to face any risk, as this story proves: British money didn't want to back the Pi when it was unproven, and even now they could only find Japanese-American money.
I live in the North-West of England. I'm surrounded by modern (and mostly empty) high-rise developments built in the last 15 years, alternating with cheap new low-rise which have been rebuilt from scratch on the ashes of failed towns, and they're slowly decaying again, because the problem is that you can't maintain a nice house without a nice job, and construction jobs are not even for local people these days.
the sort of jobs that provide social mobility are in services (as we all know on HN), in high-quality manufacturing, and in the public sector; and it's clear this government has no idea how to help those sectors.
I would argue that it is a british factor, regardless of the name above the door it is based in the UK and as a result help the UK economy.
The reason for all those empty buildings is due to an old insurance policy (now illegal) that meant developers could build and insure against it being empty ... essentially the insurance company pays the rent if the building is empty and as such there is no incentive for the developer to actively let it out.
Setting up a line like this is expensive and unless you are willing to foot the bill for the factory setting up the line then it is understandable that most factories would decline the work if they thought the market opportunity was small of the business plan was weak.
Either way I think we both agree on this being a good thing but we don't know the context in which the work was previously declined
Now I'm imagining Maurice Moss examining his frotzed Raspberry Pi board, finding the "Made in Great Britain" badge, and shaking his head in resignation.
Hopefully this brings more control over the production by the RPi team. If something is going wrong, it's a lot easier to take a trip down the M4 (or the train) than it is to fly to China and sort things out.
Being infatuated with Top Gear, I have to imagine your name means you are an AI that James May built to do the boring things humans do like spend time online while he's away in the garage or doing another special on planes. Therefore, with you being an extension of Mr May, I have to say I agree with your proposal to charge councils by the minute for not having roadworks done properly. Imagine how well funded the Raspberry Pi Foundation would be with just one trip from Cambridgeshire to Wales!
Despite my previous attempts to moonlight as a Brit, I'm an American. As such, I find the stereotypical British aversion to driving long distances amusing. I know I would be upset at driving 20 minutes out of the way if my journey was shorter than an hour, but I (and many other Americans) frequently drive hundreds of miles in one journey every week/month/multiple times per year.
I moderated a subreddit once upon a time with two Brits who lived about an hour apart. I mentioned to them that I had just attended a meeting with a company that was directly in between their towns, and said "I was just in your neighborhood". They vehemently denied that their neighborhood stretched for a half-hour journey. Meanwhile in America, our stomping grounds can sometimes cover a hundred miles in each direction.
Sorry for going off-topic >_> As an American I don't get a chance to talk to foreigners often.
More fun than representative or informative: max mobility demand for unemployment-related benefits in various countries (UK, US, Germany: 1.5-2h, Spain: 30Km, Turkey:...).
I'm originally from South Africa, and I share your amusement with the British fear of driving long distances. That said, the drive I'm doing tonight, is only 73 miles and without traffic will take close to two hours. The roads and the trains here are simply not designed to travel a decent distance in a short period of time. That said, people still don't even do the two hour drive to the next town to go visit places on the weekend, but part of that is because one accident on the road can turn the trip into a 3-4 hour trip easily on a Saturday. Oh, and the fuel price also has to be considered.
I usually try to justify our whining about driving comparatively short distances by pointing out that our roads are rarely straight and normally badly maintained :D
And you're right about the neighborhood; I'd probably not consider mine to stretch for more than 5 miles from where I live.
With all of the manufacturing issues the RPi team has had, I can't help but think what a tremendous PIA building something reasonably sophisticated is.
Kudos to the team for taking on such a difficult and worthwhile project and putting up with all of the issues. Even if the RPi in and of itself isn't successful, it's definitely brought these kinds of small, cheap simply computers to the forefront of many minds and that's a good thing.
Fantastic news and glad they have been on the case about this since day one.
Two things out of this whole affair that stand out are:
1) UK Manufacturing clearly needs a better way to make its services available so people can utilise them, the goverment should be helping in this area. Wales have done alot to promote manufacturing and probably has a fair chunk of the UK production, the whole of the UK should be made more aware of this local resource.
2) TAX on a made product compared to the bits to assemble said product. From the current standing it is more cost effective to make products outside the UK as apposed to buying in those parts seperately and in bulk and making the product localy TAX wise, this is again another area the UK goverment has to address.
But the reality of bring some types of manufacturing back localy, even if driven by some of the lesser reasons makes sence.
This all said I would love for a Pi with more ram and also love a couple of network ports, make a lovely firewall unit then without messing with USB network adaptors. I'd also like USB3. So with that in mind maybe there is scope for a model C and D, idealy a model you can upgrade a little bit more in those respective area's. But if I had to pick anything overall it would be a little bit more ram. But there is nothing stopping me making my own board and modifications (skills pending), like most out there probably thinking about. Open Hardware schematics on github and group effort - anybody aware of any plans or projects along those lines?
2) - Would not be such a good idea. Remember that a good chunk of these get exported to outside. Raising a protectionist barrier will just encourage other countries to do the same.
The current situation, according to [1], is that there is a higher import tax on components than on assembled boards.
This is, as I understand it, because there's no import duty on components that are part of information technology products such as computers[2] - but components which are not yet part of such a product are subject to import duty.
To fix this we don't need to raise a protectionist import duty for IT products - we can just drop the import duty on electronic components.
Maybe a better way to tackle this would be to balance things up by imposing a weight based import duty that we shall call the enviromental TAX. This would be the way to address this and also balance out the whole import/export aspect, especialy if every country sat down and looked it from a impact perspective. But in a way that if you import a product in component and in part form that they both at least cost the same import TAX wise, that would be a start at least.
But at the very least the current situation is only accomodating with large plants like Sony's who are able to talk to goverments about TAX breaks and deals to actualy make a plant and the cost of import viable. This needs to be addressed as a whole and allow even medium sized companies to compete, so that even little people have some hope.
Sadly until enough people that people listern to speak up this situation will just stagnate on as it is. I'm full of hope this news item may eventualy put some momentum behind the needed changes and at the very least get them on the table in goverment so they start to look at the issues.
Hmmm, you raise a fair point in that, when you look at the import/export tax offset then its a whole new area in regards to importing compenents and manufacturing in the UK and then exporting. Not sure if import/export TAX works like VAT in that you can offset VAT you pay against what you charge, though I suspect paying import TAX and then exporting that item and expecting some kind of offset would make sence.
Since the dawn of globalization and the post-Cold war era, a number of countries are getting slot marked into particular sectors like:
China for manufacturing, US for design, software, German auto mobile, India for outsourced services etc.
But to have a thriving and healthy society in a country, the variety is important so that people can pursue different interests and are not forced to migrate because there is no high-quality work in that area in that country.
Only way to do this is to protect the domestic market from foreign investment and give some time for high quality local players to grow. Then open for competition. But if a second world government does it, it is blamed for not allowing reforms and accused of denying progress to its citizens
So now another way is opening up.
So it is good for China too if such things happen. If a bunch of high quality companies open up in stuff that UK is traditionally known for (financial services?) then
the balance will be stuck.
I hope financial institutions like IMF, World Bank take such things into count and come up with measures to increase variety in every country. It will make life a lot
better for a lot of people.
"Last year, when nobody had heard of the Raspberry Pi, we had been unable to find a British manufacturer whose prices per unit (especially at a point where we were thinking of sales in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands you’re seeing now) would work for us, and who believed that the project would be enough of a success for them to risk line space for us."
Who wouldn't take one project because they were afraid you wouldn't come back for more? Is business so hopping over there that people scoff at a $1M deal because you may not come back later for a $5M deal? Or, were you actually asking them to reserve production, but that you might cancel before it started?
The key point I think is line space. Getting set up for production is quite a bit of work, and given that their new contract is for 30,000/month, the manufacturers clearly didn't want to set up an entire production line if they may only get a couple of months of usage out of it (since the original order would've been only in the tens of thousands).
That is the key thing I question and makes me wonder about EMS in the UK. There are literally dozens of vendors who would kill for that job here in the States - even without any guarantee of repeat order. There just must not be very many there in the UK.
(I do understand some of what it takes to setup and run a manufacturing line, I work with several EMSes both in the US and China and run a [smaller scale] electronics manufacturer.)
Edit: Before my comment is taken the wrong way, what I am wondering is if the UK has much capacity for mid-scale EMS/CEM, or if the industry there has been largely tailored towards the very big players. But, I'm pretty sure I misread the statement, namely that they meant that the only places willing to take the jobs were charging too much, rather than that no one wanted the job because it was too small.
It depends on the design (PTH or SMD). A lot of PTH takes a lot of people, as many parts still can't be machine-placed.
The facility we use an hour from us runs about 600 PTH units (about 40 components/board) on one assembly line with 10 people in about 4 hours. I doubt one would always work them at that level. Lead-bending, wave soldering is all pretty much automated.
The bulk of an SMD process is done by pick-and-place, our stuff gets run on 10,000+ CPH machines. You need one person to load/de-load panels and switch out feeders - and one person can work multiple machines if everything is set up right. The machines in general are really good these days.
Printing and machining the PCBs takes some time, but this is a process that can flow continuously once you let a little backlog build up at each stage. Electrical testing can be slow at the back-end, as is polishing board edges, packaging, etc.
I could see it taking 30 people to do 10k a month, but the same 30 people possibly capable of 60k+ a month. It depends on where you load them in the process. The more SMD the more volume you can get up to the testing/packaging stage. rPi is mostly SMD, with some PTH - so they have to mix the processes, but its really hard to avoid...)
Notably, however, if you look at the Hackberry (which I like better, btw!) the vast majority of the connectors are SMD. I wonder if the rPI could see some labor savings (at higher BOM) by switching to them.
One thing we've been working on in-house is making big automated jigs to program and test entire panels of devices at once, before they're de-paneled. These are really expensive to make though (think $5k+ per jig) - but they save us thousands of hours of labor a year. We're moving to make machines that can do it without jigs now. Fun stuff =)
Margins. In other words if cost of sales is high enough (and it usually is for large/old b2b) then working with small time customers is net negative revenue.
The biggest thing to take away from this isn't just they get to say made in Britain but that they've created an additional 30 jobs. Not only are they making a difference in encouraging people to learn from the hardware but they're also now creating another positive effect on society through job creation.
In the UK initially but they had to scale out to Hong Kong for the international market (via Wong Electronics) as they were a little bit more successful than they expected. Nice to see it happening the other way round.
I tracked down this snippet which says who built it:
"A feature it shares with the BBC is that it is an all-British product; designed by Acorn, it is being built by ICL and Cleartone with custom-built chips by Ferranti."
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Mags/AU/AU_Nov84_IndiaTakes... gives detail of the Indian manufacture by Semiconductor Complex Ltd [under license from the American Rockwell Corp] and Mexican production by Harry Mazal (a company). It notes that the ULA will continue to be made by Acorn themselves (presumably in the UK).
>In both China and India, the consumer markets are comparatively small, but, as the
Indian deal shows, the educational and industrial sectors are massive. And both countries are crying out for western technology //
>Acorn will probably subcontract assembly to Cleartone in Abercarn; the Department of Industry’s £60,000 contribution meant that assembly would have to be in Britain. It will be marketed under licence from a box number, by mail-order. //
Great news! However, it would be even better if everything were made in the UK. Would be nice if the US could follow suit. Unfortunately it usually isn't good for business. But I don't believe that the government should interfere with free trade to promote such things.
We priced our product for uk and china and china was infact more expensive because of the way they price plastics. Sometimes UK is best