Raspberry Pi Production Heats Up In UK Surpassing Chinese Production Soon

hypnosec writes "The majority of $35 Raspberry Pi production was shifted to a factory in Wales from China and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced this week that the factory in Wales has produced its half millionth unit in just over six months. The weekly production has shot up to 40,000 units in the UK factory and that number is 'set to climb further.' The Foundation is optimistic about the Welsh factory and said there will be 'more Made in the U.K. Pis in the world than their Made in China cousins.' The Foundation didn't reveal anything else apart from this, but we already know it sold the millionth Pi back in January."

Comments

Re:Subsidised?

[MLCT]

The days of everything being far (i.e. an order of magnitude) cheaper to make in China than the west are slowly coming to an end. There is still a price advantage ATM, but it is eroding, and parity exists in some areas, and there is an actual price advantage with western labour in a few situations.

There was a documentary on UK TV last year that looked at a cushion factory which was seeing parity between its Chinese and UK plant - and this is sowing and stuffing cushions, not making high value goods:

The Town Taking on China

Basically wage costs are rising fast in China, coupled with a labour force that shops around constantly to get the best deal, playing factories off against each other (that leads not only to higher wage costs, but also difficulty in skill retention). Skill retention may not mean much when it is sowing cushions, but there is always a learning curve for efficient work, and poor retention impacts on productivity. The third string in the bow is shipping costs - the price of fuel has quadrupled in the last 15 years.

All of these things add up. The good thing is that some basic manufacturing jobs will move back to the west rebalancing the economy - the bad thing is that most manufactured goods will jump back on to the inflation conveyer belt again - after ~20 years of their cost being frozen while our pay still rose at 3-5% per year - they will be back in step again as China starts to level out with the west on living standards.

Sony

[dutchwhizzman]

They are producing in the Sony plant in the UK. How Sony does it, I don't know, but presumably they have come up with some sort of financial plan that includes tax breaks and possibly subsidization of some sort to get these produced in the UK at a competing price. Don't forget that import taxes for ICT equipment into the EU are quite hefty. Maybe substantially lower than on electronic components? What I know is that they got a price quoted by Sony that was more than interesting enough to commit to a large number of RPis made in the UK. That number was enough for Sony to re-tool the UK factory and get the special equipment required to mount the memory chips on top of the SoC. That was the main investment for Sony, since they didn't have anything that could do that part of the process. The rest was basically just rearranging existing equipment and staff for this production line.