It can be like “Back to the Future.” The manufacturing that used to be done in the U.S. 30 years ago can be re-shored to avoid high tariffs on electronics such as phones and laptops currently assembled in China. But it won’t be assembled by millions of human workers, as in China today. Rather, thousands of robots, supervised by hundreds of the world’s leading experts in manufacturing and robotics, will do the work.
That is how it used to be done at Chicago-based Motorola, the inventor of the cellphone. Contrary to some uninformed opinions, the restoration of that excellence and the reshoring of phone and other electronics manufacturing to the U.S. can be completed in less than three years, with negligible rise in unit costs.
Over the last three decades, robotic tools have become even more capable and affordable. An independent, private study by my company that if 50 million smartphones are now assembled and tested in the U.S. every year by robots using imported parts, the cost will go up by only $30 per phone — nowhere near the 25 percent increase in labor cost or the $3,000 price quoted by skeptics of tariffs in the financial media.
According to APSTL, plants in the U.S. will need approximately 6,000 robotic tools to assemble 50 million smartphones every year at a cost $ 7.2 billion. It will require a skilled and well-paid support staff of some 30,000 workers (at an average salary of $110,000 per year each), replacing some 500,000 workers. The U.S. can avoid tariff costs for the simpler parts used in phones that are now made in China (worth about $200 per phone) by making those parts in the U.S. using modern factories with robots.
However, to sustain technological leadership and competitiveness, an additional minimum 10 percent of budget costs will have to be spent on research and development. U.S. companies must maintain strict control over any new technologies developed here, if they are to prevent a repeat of the unchecked transfer of advanced manufacturing technologies and know-how to competitors and adversaries via outsourcing.
It should be noted that the role of the human staff will be primarily to support the robots — monitoring them via computer, providing maintenance, programming and engineering. This is very different from traditional and tedious mass production procedures of yore, and compatible with the skills and interests of a computer-literate new generation. This is exactly the type of manufacturing job that should be created in the U.S. today. Following old Motorola practice, all recruits would be given intense on-the-job training.
This strategy can be used to reshore the manufacturing of other electronic systems, such as laptops, data center servers and the creation of chips used in automobiles (another segment of the industry that China is trying to corner). The manufacture of the most advanced processor chips is already highly robotic. What is needed to re-establish leadership here, however, is not more robots but the intensification of research and development.
The Trump administration can truly make America great again and bring the country back to its manufacturing heyday if he invests appropriately in the robots of the future — and the Americans who power them.
Dr. Dev Gupta is founder and CTO of APSTL LLC, engaged in research and development of advanced semiconductor technologies. His past inventions in semiconductor manufacturing at Motorola and Intel helped enable the latest AI hardware today. He chairs a section of the IEEE International Roadmap for Semiconductor Devices.
