...My host, a NASA engineer turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has just conducted a fascinating tour of his new clean-energy bench-scale test facility. It’s one of the Valley’s hottest clean-technology startups. And he’s already thinking of going abroad.
“Wages?” I ask.
His dark eyebrows arch as if I were clueless, then he explains the reality of running a fab -- an electronics fabrication factory. “Wages have nothing to do with it. The total wage burden in a fab is 10 percent. When I move a fab to Asia, I might lose 10 percent of my product just in theft.”
I’m startled. “So what is it?”
Read the rest--and Part Two when it materializes.
3 comments:
Yes and no. Labor cost is the big deal where I work. By far. It is not always that way and tax and regulation play a big part, but by far it is labor cost.
It's all regs here... Quality, finance, EHS, security... Some of them extremely necessary, a lot of them not so much. Our labor cost at a fabrication plant in PA is ~$25 per hour, fully burdened it goes to over $100 per hour.
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