Reshoring isn’t speeding up under current trade and Buy-American laws, according to a July 2018 report from A.T. Kearney.
In fact, imports into the United States from 14 trading partners in Asia rose by $55 billion or 8 percent.
A.T. Kearney is a management consultancy firm focused on business transformation.
The figure they report is the largest year-over-year increase since the economy rallied in 2011. The major contributors include “the continued economic benefits of producing labor-intensive products overseas, the fact that significant offshore investments were made that are not easily abandoned, and the domestic shortage of skilled labor for manufacturing operations,” said the report’s authors.
The report found that 12.4 cents worth of imports from the examined offshore countries headed to the U.S. with every $1 of domestic manufacturing gross output.
The complete report can be found here.
Some American industries are seeing benefits from reshoring: the transportation equipment manufacturing industry in particular stands to benefit and added 208,747 jobs between 2010 and 2017, according to Statista.
Automation, in part driven by manufacturing processes themselves developed overseas, is also deeply tied to the conversation around reshoring, since automation likewise strikes many as a threat to jobs.
“Ten years ago, relocating manufacturing to a low-cost country was the preferred strategy,” wrote Seraph Consulting founder Ambrose Conroy. Conroy also addressed the difficulty of decommissioning facilities and suggested considerations for reshoring logistics in his feature story last year. “Today, the decision is complicated by both protectionist politics and the rapid rise of automation; inaccurately planning for upfront costs, long-term costs and risk only complicates things further.”
