According to a report in The Economist (19 January, 2013), there is now a movement of bringing outsourced productions in China and elsewhere back home to the United States. The report says, "GE’s line has now reversed. Jeff Immelt, Mr Welch’s successor, calls outsourcing “yesterday’s model”. He has returned production of fridges, washing machines and heaters from China back to Kentucky. Having shipped much of its IT work outside America, the conglomerate is now shifting it back and taking on hundreds of IT engineers at a new centre in Michigan".

And GE is not alone, according to the Special Report of The Economist.

The reasons are that China's labour costs have risen rapidly. The country has a target of 13% annual increase in its minimum wage to 2015, by which time aggregate outsourcing costs of production in China would almost equate production costs back home. The second reason is technological, as advanced manufacturing technologies such as robotics and 3-D printing are making labour intensive operations less competitive overall. The third reason is proximity to home research facilities and markets, translating into greater efficiency in market response. The fourth reason is socio-political as bringing jobs back home wins popular cudos.

All, however, is not yet lost for out-sourcing as most "outsourced" production in China still chooses to stay for the massive, expanding China market which such production is well-placed to exploit.

In any case, there has been much less re-shoring back to Europe as there
was less outsourced European production in the first place, because of labour inflexibility.

Moreover, with seven million graduates added every year, China is forecast to have some 200 million university graduates by 2015, bigger than the entire workforce of the United States. With China becoming the world's top patent filer, Click here  some foreign companies are expanding their R & D facilities in China, especially to serve the Chinese market.

So,
it is not surprisng that a blog in the Financial Times features
"Re-shoring: Five reasons why China will remain the world's factory"

Howewver, robotics is a definite game-changer as a video of 60 Minutes shows. Indeed, we are likely to be only at the doorstep of a major paradigm shift in the global business of how and where manufacturing is to be organised. With 3-D printing and de-modularized applications that can exist in the electronic cloud, a fixed factory floor seems to be losing relevance. Could a flottila of floating ships calling on various ports for resource inputs and off-loading "just-in-time" products for different markets be the answer, as one of my professional Linked-In groups opines? 

However, while
all this exciting technological vision may well become reality, one big elephant in the room is
how to generate sufficient gainful employment for the masses,
especially the vast proportion of humanity in the developing world
grappling with poverty or aspiring to a better life and higher standards
of liviing.

The past two industrial revolutions have turned the factory into a
cradle for the globe's rising middle-class. Although the emerging middle
class is now in a ""fast- track" mode, according to a BBVA research report, it begs the question how most of their jobs, or their economic and social
trajectory, can lie on the oceans or in the cloud.