There are huge differences between China and countries like Vietnam and Mexico.

Vietnam is significantly poorer with poor infrastructure. They don’t have the capacity to move enough finished products onto modern container ships today. Their electricity infrastructure is unreliable, their local freight rail is poor, and their roads are awful. Chinese wages are much higher than Vietnam now, but because of economies of scale, China can invest in the best industrial infrastructure in the world to help keep prices down for manufactures in every other part of the business process. Vietnam could catch up one day, but they are far behind. India is also in this same position.

Mexico has wages that are just as high as China, but also has terrible infrastructure and and a failing government. No one in China is worried their products will be held hostage by drug gangs, or that their engineers inspecting their factories will get kidnapped.

China is doing so well because they have planned ahead. They created world class manufacturing infrastructure around Shanghai and Shenzhen that have laid the groundwork for modernizing the entire country. They have done a very good job building their “moat” to discourage manufacturers from moving elsewhere, there are just too many potential savings to keep manufacturing in China rather than take a risk moving elsewhere. Despite the US pushing “derisking” so hard, it will have only a slow impact on pushing companies to leave, because the US cannot actually offer them a better deal to move somewhere else.

There’s a very simple way to measure the migration of manufacturing out of China.

get a list of the top ten cargo ports in the world. count how many are mainland China?

7 or 8 right?

okay let’s go down the list until we get Vietnam or India or someplace where’d you’d expect the manufacturing to go to.

aight… now compare all the cargo capacity for that entire country to one of the eight ports in China? tell you what, let’s include India, and Rotterdam, and LA… just add them all together. How many of 8 does it take to keep up with that 2 or 3 ?

so, cargo shipping capacity… big difference right? day light.

Vietnam wants to make iPhones. you gotta ship 110% of the various bits into Vietnam and then ship out 99% of the finished goods.

all those ports come with piles and piles of back end infrastructure. roads. trucking. rail. skilled workers…

there are infinite alternatives to China. but it will take 40 years to develop any of them to that level.

Are there alternatives though? Apple moved some production to Vietnam, for example. Do you know who’s their partner in Vietnam? Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known as Foxconn. Yeah, China, again.