It means that the US is producing a lot of valuable stuff, but not much of it is durable consumer products like clothes or electronics. The US is, for instance, the world's number one aircraft producer by a significant margin, and one Boeing 747 is worth a lot of cheap Chinese t-shirts.
I used to work in US manufacturing. We built chips. The way it worked is that major fab operations, especially the ones that benefited from the close proximity of Ph.D.-educated senior engineers, were done in the USA. Then the parts would be shipped in wafer form to be diced and packaged in Asia because dicing, packaging, wire bonding and inspecting are human-intensive jobs that are hard to fully automate.
Hands-on work like sewing and hand assembly gets done in Asia where there is a good supply of cheap labor, but that doesn't mean that plenty of stuff doesn't get built in the USA, often with extensive help from robots and computers.
With the exception of Intel and TI, I think that "major fab operations" for most of the US semiconductor industry are now handled by TSMC, UMC and other foundries in Asia.
Comments
It means that the US is producing a lot of valuable stuff, but not much of it is durable consumer products like clothes or electronics. The US is, for instance, the world's number one aircraft producer by a significant margin, and one Boeing 747 is worth a lot of cheap Chinese t-shirts.
I used to work in US manufacturing. We built chips. The way it worked is that major fab operations, especially the ones that benefited from the close proximity of Ph.D.-educated senior engineers, were done in the USA. Then the parts would be shipped in wafer form to be diced and packaged in Asia because dicing, packaging, wire bonding and inspecting are human-intensive jobs that are hard to fully automate.
Hands-on work like sewing and hand assembly gets done in Asia where there is a good supply of cheap labor, but that doesn't mean that plenty of stuff doesn't get built in the USA, often with extensive help from robots and computers.
With the exception of Intel and TI, I think that "major fab operations" for most of the US semiconductor industry are now handled by TSMC, UMC and other foundries in Asia.