Why is Europe so bad at consumer electronics.

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?

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

Workers have too many rights and entitlements.

Eradicate the workers and Europe will rise again.

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

anncoates wrote: »

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

Then who'd work downd mill?

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.

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.