Why is Europe so bad at consumer electronics.

SafeSurfer

Why are European companies so poor in the field of consumer electronics? When was the last time you bought a phone, TV or tablet made by a European company? Nokia and Philips were the last products that I bought, about 5 years ago. Both of these, once dominant brands have now been sidelined.
Why can Asia and the US do it but not Europe.

errlloyd

Can the US do it? I know apple is American, but realistically iPhones and S5s come out of the same factory in China.

Hotfail.com

Dunno.

The Strawman Argument

They're all made by ODMs located in Taiwan and operating in China anyway. 94% of laptops in 2011 were made by taiwanese companies, iirc. Makes sense for whatever extra work there's to be done on top of that to likely be cheaper in some nearby countries too, easier to build relationships and whathaveyou.

errlloyd wrote: »

Can the US do it? I know apple is American, but realistically iPhones and S5s come out of the same factory in China.

Yep, Apple is more a great marketing/design company than a consumer electronics company ...someone like Samsung might be closer to a pure consumer electronics corporation?

Aongus Von Bismarck

I have a Bang and Olufsen television that is made in Europe.

Sennheiser are a German brand with much of their products being produced in Ireland.

The premium end of the market still has European companies involved. You need to be able to pay that premium to know the product was designed and manufactured in Europe.

Sh1tbag OToole

Because of the size of frickin Shenzhen at this stage, any electronic component you can think of and it's factory is on your doorstep. Feck all regulation, loads of cheap workers (though this is changing)

The thing about it is if you tried to start manufacturing electronics here and even if the price of components or labour was no issue the powers that be will do everything to make life hard for you. You will need to comply with all sorts of nonsense laws, pay high rent, rates, mandatory insurance whereas in China a CE certification only costs a scrap of paper and a bit of ink.

China seems to devour European elecronics companies, the process usually goes as follows:
1- Prestigious brand feels the need to compete with the lower end of the market (cheap Chinese sh1t coming in)
2- Buys some rebranded or custom made goods from a factory in China
3- Mid range products also affected, at this stage the company might open a factory in China or sign a big contract with an existing one there
4- Only the very high end stuff still made in Europe
5- Things go bad for the European company, the Chinese factory now has enough money to buy them out
6- The brand and a small office of support staff continues to operate in Europe, but controlled by chinese

131spanner

Cos Asians have little-er hands to piece together the doo-hickeys.

It's simple science.

ancapailldorcha

It's nothing to do with quality. People just want either cheap electronics or something with a daft Apple logo on it that works no better than most of the devices available.

The money isn't in the gadgets alone, it's in the high tech stuff that powers them.

here are some of the percentages of dollars received for each iPhone sold, according to Reich: 34%, Japan; 17%, Germany; 13%, South Korea; 6%, United States; and only 3.6% to China because, he says, that nation is only assembling the product not producing the components.

The Backwards Man

Workers have too many rights and entitlements.

Eradicate the workers and Europe will rise again.

Muahahaha

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Workers have too many rights and entitlements.

Eradicate the workers and Europe will rise again.

That'll never work. Our big beefy European hands wont be able to make gadgets and the whole continent would become a bunch of Luddites

anncoates

We need to get kids into factories here to catch up.

FloatingVoter

Because design and engineering are still seen as separate galaxies from an education point of view. Apple marry the two - Jonathan Ive had to leave Europe before he got a free hand at Apple.
When Art colleges have an engineering department and engineering departments have design courses on the same campus, you'll see results in everything from computers to cars.

The Backwards Man

anncoates wrote: »

We need to get kids into factories here to catch up.

Then who'd work downd mill?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

House of Blaze

Two words..

Cheap labour.

Akrasia

Ireland makes shed loads of microprocessors in Kildare.

We don't assemble many finished products anymore since Dell fecked off, but it doensn't mean we don't have an important manufacturing industry based here.

srsly78

Samsung do a lot of their software engineering in London.

salamanca22

A lot of the engineering is done in europe however the actual finished product comes from elsewhere as it is much cheaper to manufacture outside of Europe.

Egginacup

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Why are European companies so poor in the field of consumer electronics? When was the last time you bought a phone, TV or tablet made by a European company? Nokia and Philips were the last products that I bought, about 5 years ago. Both of these, once dominant brands have now been sidelined.
Why can Asia and the US do it but not Europe.

I don't think the US manufacture anything anymore and when they did I though the quality was generally poor. In the field of European electronics I've possessed European gadgets in the past made by the following companies and have been very happy with the quality:

Philips
Grundig
Telefunken
Nordmende
Bang & Olufsen
Siemens

But one has to take into consideration the Japanese culture. They are masters at making things and would sooner break even making a quality product they can be proud of than make a profit producing something substandard.

cml387

Egginacup wrote: »

I don't think the US manufacture anything anymore and when they did I though the quality was generally poor. In the field of European electronics I've possessed European gadgets in the past made by the following companies and have been very happy with the quality:

Philips
Grundig
Telefunken
Nordmende
Bang & Olufsen
Siemens

But one has to take into consideration the Japanese culture. They are masters at making things and would sooner break even making a quality product they can be proud of than make a profit producing something substandard.

Bear in mind there is no manufacturer of LCD displays in Europe so tv's will be sourced from Asia.
Philips have long since transferred their consumer electronics to China.

ScumLord

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Eradicate the workers and Europe will rise again.

I doubt it, if we eradicate the workers it would just leave the people on the dole and children.

Electronics are made in Europe, there are electronic components made in Ireland and put into Irish products. They just tend to be more expensive so they sell to the higher ends of the markets or on niche products like home automation.

srsly78

Ireland is one of the largest exporters of software in the world (was actually #1 a few years ago). All those fancy electronics would not be much good without this.

c_man

srsly78 wrote: »

Ireland is one of the largest exporters of software in the world (was actually #1 a few years ago).

Are we really? I work in software dev, have heard this bandied around for years but is it actually based on anything? Not having a go, genuinely curious.

Reindeer

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Why are European companies so poor in the field of consumer electronics? When was the last time you bought a phone, TV or tablet made by a European company? Nokia and Philips were the last products that I bought, about 5 years ago. Both of these, once dominant brands have now been sidelined.
Why can Asia and the US do it but not Europe.

Let's not confuse manufacturing with designing. China doesn't design a damn thing. Their prominence in manufacturing is purely due to the fact they can use a combination of CNC machining and nearly slave labour to bring a product to market at a mere fraction of the costs of manufacturing in Europe. You are starting to see this in Europe - back in the States, China has been prominent for decades.

However, most US medical brands manufacture their equipment, aside from circuit boards, in the US. And all that fancy military stuff nearly is made start to finish in the US.

srsly78

c_man wrote: »

Are we really? I work in software dev, have heard this bandied around for years but is it actually based on anything? Not having a go, genuinely curious.

Yes it's true, go look up the statistics. Note that this refers to exports, not total software produced. So while it's true that many larger countries produce much more software, much of this gets used domestically. We export a lot because we have so many multinationals based here, and our domestic market is small.

ScumLord

c_man wrote: »

Are we really? I work in software dev, have heard this bandied around for years but is it actually based on anything? Not having a go, genuinely curious.

The trick is to upload the software twice.

c_man

srsly78 wrote: »

Yes it's true, go look up the statistics..

No, too busy writing software for export.

Bang_Bang

Egginacup wrote: »

But one has to take into consideration the Japanese culture. They are masters at making things and would sooner break even making a quality product they can be proud of than make a profit producing something substandard.

Genichi Taguchi, and Kano spring to mind here, the mindset in Japan is that is fcuking shamful to create a shíte product.

Guess where most of our product complaints come from? Japan. They really want everything to last forever. They'll send it back even if it's working ok, seriously I mean that.

Where I work, the design and qualification and initial process ramp is done here in Ireland, then we send it to Asia for high volume manufacturing.

BeerWolf

Got a number of German products...

jimgoose

c_man wrote: »

Are we really? I work in software dev, have heard this bandied around for years but is it actually based on anything? Not having a go, genuinely curious.

Yes. Think of it not in terms of boxes of Windows MeToo(TM) Aluminium Edition(R), but in terms of revenue.

Barely There

The fact of the matter, is that the average sausaged-fingered European scientist will never be able to compete against the nimble-fingered Asian in the field of miniature electronics.

Carawaystick

Apple make a load of computers in Cork.

jimgoose

Barely There wrote: »

The fact of the matter, is that the average sausaged-fingered European scientist will never be able to compete against the nimble-fingered Asian in the field of miniature electronics.

Legend has it that even loudmouth, lazy upstate New Yorkers are able to put it up to them, especially around Poughkeepsie.

UCDVet

srsly78 wrote: »

Yes it's true, go look up the statistics. Note that this refers to exports, not total software produced. So while it's true that many larger countries produce much more software, much of this gets used domestically. We export a lot because we have so many multinationals based here, and our domestic market is small.

I think the problem is that 'software exports' is really difficult to define. To be honest, it sounds like more of a tax reporting thing than anything else. The articles I can find claiming Ireland to be the #1 software exporter also points out that 88% of that software is from foreign companies. (http://www.independent.ie/business/ireland-the-largest-software-exporter-26122125.html) Not sure exactly what that means though.

Foreign companies account for 88pc of software exports from Ireland.

Just by numbers....that doesn't make sense to me. Ireland is pretty small, right? How many software developers do we even have? If we're the #1 exporter, it'd make sense that we'd be #1 or #2 in the number of developers, at least, to me, that would make sense.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/there-are-185-million-software-developers-in-the-world-but-which-country-has-the-most/

The analyst said that worldwide the US accounts for 19 percent of software developers (both professional and hobbyists), followed by China with 10 percent, and offshore outsourcing powerhouse India with 9.8 percent.

So the US has 2x as many as China and India - which is staggering given the population of China and India. While I can't find a specific number for how many software developers are in Ireland, everything I've found suggests that it is less than the UK and Germany and France.

(http://blog.assembla.com/AssemblaBlog/tabid/12618/bid/42306/Country-report-Where-in-the-world-are-the-software-developers.aspx - the data is is pretty skewed towards English speaking countries, as explained on the site. Even still, the numbers have come up are)

Russia: 6.3%
India: 5%
UK 4.8%
Germany 4.3%
France: 3.7%
etc...
Ireland doesn't appear on their list.

Finally - while not at all scientific - if I go to CareerBuilder.ie and search for 'Software' I find 296 jobs. If I go to Careerbuilder.com and search for 'Software' - I find 71,600 jobs.

I guess I remain skeptical that Ireland is the #1 exporter of software. Dublin is certainly a tech city and it's a great place to be a software developer but it still seems pretty small on the scale of the entire US or China or India.

srsly78

It's not amount of software produced, it's amount exported. Of course much more gets produced in India and the USA. And also yes, the statistics can be misleading. Microsoft package lots of xbox games in Ireland for example, the box will say "made in Ireland" on the back. The software however sure as hell wasn't made here tho...

Also, all that american software (produced in america) often gets sold via Ireland for tax reasons.

ToddyDoody

Because electronics is maths-based and Asians are better at maths, possibly because numbers are a big part of Asian life given the amount of Asians there are? Am I being racist / ignorant?

Bang_Bang

ToddyDoody wrote: »

Because electronics is maths-based and Asians are better at maths, possibly because numbers are a big part of Asian life given the amount of Asians there are? Am I being racist / ignorant?

Development is done in the west (excluding the Japanese) then high volume production is carried out in Malaysia, Taiwan and China etc... The R&D grants here are very similar to the manufacturing grants prostituted by the government in the late 90's. They were % pulled around 2004/5. That's when manufactures started to pull out.

The commited MNC's built centres of excellence in Ireland with the likes of trinity college and others around the country. Now we develop what is manufactued in Asia, in terms of a shed load of electronics.

ted1

Carawaystick wrote: »

Apple make a load of computers in Cork.

Not any more, up to recently they only made the larger servers but I believe that has being phased out

Frank Lee Midere

UCDVet wrote: »

I think the problem is that 'software exports' is really difficult to define. To be honest, it sounds like more of a tax reporting thing than anything else. The articles I can find claiming Ireland to be the #1 software exporter also points out that 88% of that software is from foreign companies. (http://www.independent.ie/business/ireland-the-largest-software-exporter-26122125.html) Not sure exactly what that means though.


Just by numbers....that doesn't make sense to me. Ireland is pretty small, right? How many software developers do we even have? If we're the #1 exporter, it'd make sense that we'd be #1 or #2 in the number of developers, at least, to me, that would make sense.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/there-are-185-million-software-developers-in-the-world-but-which-country-has-the-most/



So the US has 2x as many as China and India - which is staggering given the population of China and India. While I can't find a specific number for how many software developers are in Ireland, everything I've found suggests that it is less than the UK and Germany and France.

(http://blog.assembla.com/AssemblaBlog/tabid/12618/bid/42306/Country-report-Where-in-the-world-are-the-software-developers.aspx - the data is is pretty skewed towards English speaking countries, as explained on the site. Even still, the numbers have come up are)

Russia: 6.3%
India: 5%
UK 4.8%
Germany 4.3%
France: 3.7%
etc...
Ireland doesn't appear on their list.

Finally - while not at all scientific - if I go to CareerBuilder.ie and search for 'Software' I find 296 jobs. If I go to Careerbuilder.com and search for 'Software' - I find 71,600 jobs.

I guess I remain skeptical that Ireland is the #1 exporter of software. Dublin is certainly a tech city and it's a great place to be a software developer but it still seems pretty small on the scale of the entire US or China or India.

some might be re-exports but the number of devs != amount of software produced. I worked on software used by 100M+ people.

ted1

UCDVet wrote: »

I think the problem is that 'software exports' is really difficult to define. To be honest, it sounds like more of a tax reporting thing than anything else. The articles I can find claiming Ireland to be the #1 software exporter also points out that 88% of that software is from foreign companies. (http://www.independent.ie/business/ireland-the-largest-software-exporter-26122125.html) Not sure exactly what that means though.


Just by numbers....that doesn't make sense to me. Ireland is pretty small, right? How many software developers do we even have? If we're the #1 exporter, it'd make sense that we'd be #1 or #2 in the number of developers, at least, to me, that would make sense.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/there-are-185-million-software-developers-in-the-world-but-which-country-has-the-most/



So the US has 2x as many as China and India - which is staggering given the population of China and India. While I can't find a specific number for how many software developers are in Ireland, everything I've found suggests that it is less than the UK and Germany and France.

(http://blog.assembla.com/AssemblaBlog/tabid/12618/bid/42306/Country-report-Where-in-the-world-are-the-software-developers.aspx - the data is is pretty skewed towards English speaking countries, as explained on the site. Even still, the numbers have come up are)

Russia: 6.3%
India: 5%
UK 4.8%
Germany 4.3%
France: 3.7%
etc...
Ireland doesn't appear on their list.

Finally - while not at all scientific - if I go to CareerBuilder.ie and search for 'Software' I find 296 jobs. If I go to Careerbuilder.com and search for 'Software' - I find 71,600 jobs.

I guess I remain skeptical that Ireland is the #1 exporter of software. Dublin is certainly a tech city and it's a great place to be a software developer but it still seems pretty small on the scale of the entire US or China or India.

Buildings aren't measured by the number if builders, but rather developers and architects. Take Microsoft, office comes out of Dublin even if the coding is handeled elsewhere

paulthom8

High volumes produced much quicker and cheaper for the markets are key to reasoning why this is so.

UCDVet

ted1 wrote: »

Buildings aren't measured by the number if builders, but rather developers and architects. Take Microsoft, office comes out of Dublin even if the coding is handeled elsewhere

If the coding is handled elsewhere, I don't think it's even remotely fair to claim that Ireland is exporting that product.

UCDVet

Frank Lee Midere wrote: »

some might be re-exports but the number of devs != amount of software produced. I worked on software used by 100M+ people.

Again - it would depend on how we're saying 'produced'.

If you write a book that sells 100M copies - have you produced one book, or 100M?

Anyway, when I look at the most popular, most used software, I don't think anyone could make a claim that majority of them are developed in Ireland. Yes, yes, Microsoft has an office in Ireland, I'm not disputing that. But is more code produced in Ireland than in the US? Because, if not, the US is exporting more code.

srsly78

Yep it's a grey area. Lots of european localisation work gets done in Ireland for example. So the main work gets done elsewhere, and some strings get changed into french/german here. Still counts as our exports. Also as mentioned before, they might burn the dvds here and stick them in boxes. Thus the physical item gets produced here, which by some peoples reckoning is what matters.

Don't complain so much, our entire economy is based on this!

There are some real examples however, like crypto software. A certain Irish company led the field in this area in the 90s, much of the crypto software in the world is based on this. The Irish company has since changed hands between various multinationals several times by now ofc.

UCDVet

srsly78 wrote: »

It's not amount of software produced, it's amount exported. Of course much more gets produced in India and the USA. And also yes, the statistics can be misleading. Microsoft package lots of xbox games in Ireland for example, the box will say "made in Ireland" on the back. The software however sure as hell wasn't made here tho...

Also, all that american software (produced in america) often gets sold via Ireland for tax reasons.

UCDVet wrote:

I think the problem is that 'software exports' is really difficult to define. To be honest, it sounds like more of a tax reporting thing than anything else

Yes - now that I believe.

UCDVet

srsly78 wrote: »

Yep it's a grey area. Lots of european localisation work gets done in Ireland for example. So the main work gets done elsewhere, and some strings get changed into french/german here. Still counts as our exports. Also as mentioned before, they might burn the dvds here and stick them in boxes. Thus the physical item gets produced here, which by some peoples reckoning is what matters.

Don't complain so much, our entire economy is based on this!

Please don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining. I work in IT, so I'm glad to see the work being done in Ireland. I just felt like it might be a 'misleading' statistic (even if true).

No disrespect intended to the Irish. In my (very) limited experience, I've been impressed with the quality of Irish software companies and developers.

thunderdog

131spanner wrote: »

Cos Asians have little-er hands to piece together the doo-hickeys.

It's simple science.

Reminds me of this nugget. If your phone gets wet, try putting it in a bag of dry rice........






























At night, the rice will attract Asians who will fix your electronics for you.

kowloon

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

I have a Bang and Olufsen television that is made in Europe.

If you pulled apart your tv you would find the panel is made by another company, Bang and Olufsen don't make the panels themselves. The same could be said for the vast majority of other brands. I'm not saying they use bad panels, they won't be scraping the bottom of the barrel like some companies, but European electronics companies outsource for a lot of their components.

hmmm

California has a strong history of people setting up on their own, taking chances, getting funding, going bankrupt, repeat until you make a success of it. People, particularly young people, are not afraid to have a go with a crazy idea, and there is no shame if they fail. There's a vitality to their electronic and software industries that isn't seen in Europe & Asia.

In Europe, and particularly in ireland, you're dragged down by society and the government - taxes are high for the self employed, success is seen as something that needs to be taxed to the hilt, red tape is everywhere keeping public servants in jobs. The most common career path for an ambitious young person is to join a large company, and after about 30 years in their job they hope to get appointed to some senior position - at which point they will probably be distracted by family and other responsibilities, and they'll be anxious to avoid making mistakes and keep their "good job" by merely making incremental improvements to existing products.

Frank Lee Midere

UCDVet wrote: »

Again - it would depend on how we're saying 'produced'.

If you write a book that sells 100M copies - have you produced one book, or 100M?

Anyway, when I look at the most popular, most used software, I don't think anyone could make a claim that majority of them are developed in Ireland. Yes, yes, Microsoft has an office in Ireland, I'm not disputing that. But is more code produced in Ireland than in the US? Because, if not, the US is exporting more code.

For the purpose of exports I have produced 100M copies sold or downloaded elsewhere. ( Well that product was not just me of course).

Some of your points are correct but there is a lot of software as a service produced here which isn't just localised and exported.