For the last year and a half, people have been talking about a global chips shortage that is affecting manufacturing and production across many industries, what has caught everyone by surprise is that The United States of America, the most technologically advanced country in the world doesn’t have a single microchips factory. The world today is run by computers, and every electronic device in our homes offices or fields runs with the help of microchip technologies, I am surprised that even tractors today use computers and farmers have to learn how to use that software in order to grow their crops.
But how did the world comes to this? With a combined reasons ranging from the current pandemic, economic recessions, the trade wars and several others, nearly the manufacturing of almost every electronic gadget is coming to a standstill. What people are asking is how did the Americans who are known to be geniuses in technology come to lack microchips factories on their home soils. Chips are very complex stuff to make and require a lot of time and resources to advance, but the US has all that. So what went wrong?
Thanks to the great outsourcing scheme that sent factory jobs overseas from the US mainland. Because of cheaper labor and better business environment there for industries a lot of manufacturers moved all their production to those countries.
Things like unfriendly legislation and exorbitantly high minimum wages were a real thorn in their operating businesses. The Silicon Valley is known the world over to be the home of the dotcom revolution, everything that has to do with computers or the internet originated from the Silicon Valley. They are the guys that invented the microchips, and ushered in the digital age we are living in today, but along the way something caused them to be mistrustful of production on their own home soils and decided to move all their manufacturing processes overseas.
They had never imagined that a few years down the line there shall come a pandemic that will affect cross border trade and prevent them from getting their goods in a timely manner. Every country is now realizing how important the microchips industry is and governments are now investing directly in the building of chips factories on their own home soils. Even though they started on good footing, it takes time before such a technological industry is full thriving, probably a couple of years, so Americans now have to wait for a few years before they can see chips rolling out from their factories on their home soils.
What about the other jobs that went away and never came back, will they be returning also? Well I don’t think so, if that is possible then that will take a very long time. It takes global disasters such as epidemics to convince the people of how weak major industries are, and sometimes it takes a small natural disaster to cripple an entire industry. This chips thing in the news is sparkling a lot of imagination in my head, it sounds like an interesting story we should follow up keenly because it affects us all, or should I try building a small chips factory in my backyard just to test the ride of it. Just like I did with my crypto mining business, this should be another cool breeze. The best industries for entrepreneurs are those that don’t require a lot of startup capital.
