Slashdot Mirror
Lenovo Building Manufacturing Plant in North Carolina
An anonymous reader writes "One of the major themes of the ongoing presidential election in the United States has been the perceived need to bring product manufacturing back to the United States. A recent announcement from Lenovo is going to play to this point; the PC manufacturer said today that it's building a U.S. location in Whitsett, North Carolina. The new facility is small, with just over 100 people and is being built for a modest $2M, but Lenovo states that it's merely the beginning of a larger initiative."
It makes sense: their U.S. HQ is a stone's throw away in RTP.
Just a new line inside an existing facility. Still good news :)
K Man
Maybe they are going to be better built now?
Relatively stronger opposition to government interference has led to a tax structure which is more attractive to business.
What's Chinese for "dey derk ur derbs!"?
Just don't put it near any military bases...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
..has our dollar really declined that much?
WTF does RTP mean, in context with this story?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese Overlords!
Who's going to stick up for all the out of work Chinese?
On a serious note, no one seems to have a problem with insourcing. Concentrate on making your own country more competitive instead of erecting barriers between countries.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It must be true; Americans are better at sucking corporate disk!
American companies can not build here, but Chinese can. Just amazing how bad American leadership has become.
At this point, if the west really wants to acknowledge China's gov cold war and take it on, then we should start sending as many MBA's to China as humanly possible. Of course, the Chinese will probably realize it and simply put a bullet in each one of them and then charge the USA for it, while subsidizing and dumping the rest of the ammo on America's market.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sorry but according to obesity demographics the south won't be doing any sort of "rising" in the near future.
The worst crowd who could possibly own a company. I'd say this is just a token gesture to lull us into a false sense of security that outsourcing to China has any long term benefits
This is a small plant, so really only suited for assembling from parts, not creating new parts. Think batches of desktops assembled to spec, in the tens or hundreds, not thousands. If laptops, probably limited to swapping out keyboards for a different layout, change the hard drive, add more memory, or perhaps other warranty replacements.
Beyond that, the strong points of thinkpads were quality build and eclectic design focused on getting things done, like non-glare high-resolution high-quality 4:3 screens. That's not something fixed by swapping out a few parts in a laptop.
Alright, a different keyboard is easily swapped in, provided you have better quality ones in sensible layouts--like the lack of windows keys that was a feature for the longest time, leaving ctrl and alt nicely accessible without looking. But if you have better keyboards available, or other higher quality parts, why not stick'em in right away?
So, in a word, no, this isn't likely to magically improve the thinkpad range. For that to happen, lenovo has to realise that just the brand name isn't enough; you have to differentiate yourself. Instead, they've moved to become more like the rest, not less. Thus lessening the brand name in the process.
But they also have a line of desktops. I expect this plant is about order configuration management close to delivery, probably mostly for small bulk orders, likely desktops and perhaps some laptops too.
Did the US government do anything to incentivize Lenovo to make this decision or did Lenovo make it all on their own? What I'm wondering is whether the gov't is doing more than just talking about doing more manufacturing in the US.
> the perceived need to bring product manufacturing back to the United States
Why would the act of bringing any sort of employment back to the states be considered a 'perceived need'?
I'm posting this anonymously to protect the guilty.
I work for a company that makes great products, but isn't exactly a cutting-edge manufacturing powerhouse. I had a suspicion that the pendulum was starting to swing the other way when we moved our manufacturing to China.
It makes sense: their U.S. HQ is a stone's throw away in RTP.
Hopefully the stones are made in the US.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Dell opened a plant in NC some years back, pocketed the tax incentives, ran it a few years and then abruptly closed it. It wouldn't surprise me if Lenovo did the same.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Awesome, a new factory in the U.S. filled with robots made in China.
This is China offshoring to USA.
My wife replaced her government issued laptop recently. She was free to get whatever laptop she wanted, as long as it was not made in China. So she ended up with a Dell assembled in Ireland with parts manufactured in China. I assume the NC facility will be mainly a federal government procurement facility to comply with the "not from China" policy.
where we are grateful to our Asian overlords for considering us worthy of manufacturing jobs. Disgusting. Ross Perot was right in '92 about this and about NAFTA. He said there'd be plenty of jobs, alright on both sides of the broder, both paying $7.50 and hour
www.chihuahuarescue.com- Help to end dog abuse, abandonment and cruelty
Even if it's just for PR points, some domestic manufacturing employment is a good thing. The reason why isn't nice, it's not politically correct, but it's the facts:
Not everyone is intelligent enough for knowledge work.
In my opinion, if we continue the way we're going, we're going to spiral into a society with three classes -- business owners, knowledge workers and a huge swath of working poor. If everyone has to complete at least a masters' degree to secure a place in one of the top two classes, that completely ignores the other 75% of the IQ distribution.
Think about the way society was organized in the 50s through the 70s:
- Only the highly intelligent and/or well off went to college. They typically inherited a business, got a technical, science, engineering or other kind of knowledge job, or became academics. Each one of these outcomes guaranteed a stable job for life because that's what business ownership, academia or large corporate employment did back then. This is still the preferred path, minus the guarantees of course.
- For the high end of the medium-intelligence scale, there were plenty of paper-shuffling jobs in corporate environments. Remember that before computers, automation and email, large corporations had to employ thousands of file clerks, secretaries and layers of management that just routed paper reports around. Because US companies were doing so well, and things couldn't be outsourced and automated, a huge upper middle class thrived.
- For the low end of the medium-intelligence scale, there were millions of factory jobs. They were all simple, stand on a line for 8 hours and perform a single task or set of tasks. Because of unionization and a lack of global competition, even those jobs were stable and paid reasonable living wages. This was the bulk of the middle class, and I grew up in a Rust Belt city in the early 80s so I got to watch it all unravel live.
- The screwups, dropouts or just plain dumb people wound up doing menial labor. But even at that end of the scale, there was less downward pressure on those wages, so they were able to scrape by for the most part.
The problem is, in 2012, you can locate a factory anywhere, employ thousands of people for a fraction of the price that 100 would cost you, and pump out products just as quickly as before. All the secretaries and paper routers lost their jobs in the late 80s/early 90s automation and downsizing waves. So now, where do all those people who used to have solid incomes go? They either end up permanently unemployed, or go work menial jobs for just above minimum wage, no security and no benefits. So you have a huge class of working poor, working at Wal-Mart, as a home health care aide, or something else.
It's a really tough problem that might have a very bad ending in the next 40 years or so -- we need to find something for everyone to do and someone to employ them. Conservatives love to tout entrepreneurship as our savior, but do they really think a factory guy whose job was bolting the same two parts together for the last 20 years is going to be a successful business owner? Thinking like that will mean you have a class of bankrupt working poor instead of just working poor as all their little ventures fail.
So yes, I hope manufacturing comes back. And I hope it can be something that someone can build an entire career on, not just a string of $10/hr temp jobs.
I love it. IBM sells Lenovo to china. China decides to come back to the states and build here and people scream. Yet most of the screamers drive a toyota or nissan or volkswagen and have no qualms about supporting these foreign companies. Because... they have factories in the US? Or do they really believe they're US companies?
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Just what we need to get this economy going again. A hundred minimum wage jobs putting components manufactured in others countries together.
RTP = Research Triangle Park, NC
...to use for labor in North Carolina?
:-)
Oh, right, there's an election coming
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
they are going to 'import' more workers into the US than they employ from the local base of US citizens.
Didn't Boeing try to build there?
Pretty sure Boeing qualifies as an American company.
Maybe not, the American government squashed them.
Maybe the problem isn't necessarily business leadership....
No brain, no pain.
Actually, the idea of bringing back money earned overseas makes a LOT of sense, if you simply place a stipulation on it that it only qualifies for that tax free (or tax reduced would even work here) status if it's provably used to invest in growing the workforce here in the USA.
The rationale for keeping the money overseas is, a given corporation will be better off spending or re-investing the profits in the countries they're earned in than taking a 15% or more tax hit on bringing it back home (only to get taxed on it a second time when it's spent on things here). If you level that playing field by saying, "Bring it back if you like and we won't punish you, AS LONG AS you use it the same way you'd use it over there -- investing in your company's growth with new/improved facilities and more employees)."
The 787 is built all over the world. They brought a harvard MBA from GM that said that by outsourcing, they could solve all of their issues. The 787 is such a disaster in terms of time delays and screw-ups, that it is now officially worse then the 747 was (and that was cutting technology).
However, Boeing DID open a plant in NC to assemble aircrafts and it is going even now, as we speak. So, no, it is the f'ing business idiots.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, it does not. Last time that W did this, the companies were suppose to invest it here. They simply diverted their local money to paying 100% of the dividends and then used the tax-free money for doing the local development. IOW, the money simply flowed into tax-free dividends.
Out best bet is to put rescind W's/neo-cons tax cuts and apply it to all of the money that is offshore. In addition, roll back the ability to subtract the offshore taxes from our taxes. IOW, if they are going to offshore, fine. They simply have to pay here and there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The feel good squishy governor Bev Purdue and the Republihacks in the state legislature have stood around for years watching the unemployment rate in NC exceed the national average by a large amount. At this point they're probably happy if someone hands them a hundred jobs as long as they can continue doing nothing.
Thankfully though we have the highest taxes and costs in the entire south so there's that. YAAAAY the Tarheel State!
Are is this chinese company getting this time?
Is USA a new China!