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 US 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.
For Lenovo, local manufacturing centers are a way to respond more quickly to custom orders from corporate clients and support those orders more effectively. The president of the company's North American branch, David Schmook, likened the decision to go green. "Being green is not necessarily the lowest-cost option for a lot of companies," Schmook said, "but you do it because your customers and partners value you being green."
The Whitsett facility is a drop in the pond for Lenovo -- the company does some $30B in business on a yearly basis. Lenovo insists that the facility isn't a publicity stunt, but merely the spearhead of a longterm investment into the US. That's a marked contrast from the likes of Dell and HP, which have made headlines over the past few years for the number of jobs they were moving overseas.
There are significant questions regarding whether bringing manufacturing back to the United States would actually halt the growth of inequality or the hollowing out of the middle class. The only way to find out would be to bring jobs back in numbers several orders of magnitude greater than what Lenovo's proposing, and keep them here for a decade or two to observe the long-term effects. For the Chinese manufacturer, the good PR it'll likely gain from this timely announcement dwarfs the cost of the plant.
Whether that goodwill will translate into sales is a different question altogether. The global economy has made the entire concept of "Buy America" outdated. Buy a PC, and you're supporting a mix of Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, Korean, and US companies. Even cars, long the go-to product for some patriotic conspicuous consumption, present a thorny problem. If you buy a Toyota, you're technically helping a Japanese company -- but that company employs thousands of people in Indiana and Kentucky. Dell is an American company that's outsourced all of its production save for servers and Alienware-branded systems. Which side of the fence you come down on seems to partly depend on whether you want to support American workers or the maximization of corporate profits.
