The American Onshoring Trend Is Accelerating

Onshoring, the return of US manufacturing from abroad, is rapidly gathering pace. Get onshoring right and all of a sudden sector selection and rotation will become a piece of cake.

Of course, it is hard to quantify this assumption with hard data. US government statistics are a deep lagging indicator and are unable to keep up with a rapidly changing, interconnected, fluid world. No doubt, they will tell us this epoch making sea change is underway in ten years.

However, it is possible to track what a single company is accomplishing. In 1973, General Electric (GE) ran the largest home appliance manufacturing facility in the world.

Its Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, employed 23,000 workers packed into six gigantic buildings, each as large as a shopping mall. It was so big, it even earned its own postal zip code (40225).

After that, the offshoring mania kicked in, with the firm motivated by a single factor: hourly wages. You could hire 30 men in China for the cost of one American union worker. The savings were too compelling to pass up, and The Great Hollowing Out of US manufacturing was off to the races.

GE tried to sell the entire operation, but was too late. The 2008 financial crisis decimated the market for Midwest industrial facilities. You could only get the scrap metal value, or three cents on the dollar.

By 2011 employment at Appliance Park had plunged to 1,863 and the region’s new “Rust Belt” sobriquet was well earned.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, the trend started to reverse. Decades of 20% a year wage increases took the cost of a skilled Chinese worker from $300 a year to $25,000.

The 2011 Japanese tsunami, followed by huge floods in Thailand, caused massive disruptions to the international parts supply network.

A minor strike by the Longshoreman’s Union at the Port of Oakland in California brought the distribution channel to a grinding halt. Business plans that looked great on an Excel spreadsheet turned out to be not so hot in practice.