What a wild ride it's been at Lego.  First in mid-2006 Bill told us about their initial decisions to outsource manufacturing. The only trick the ponies from McKinsey know is outsourcing, which is exactly what [CEO] Jørgen Vig Knudstorp did.  The work in the U.S. plant in Connecticut is being sent...

It's been eighteen months since we predicted that companies chasing low labor costs to China would eventually have to strap on the sneakers and globetrot to another part of the world.  Perhaps we should have been oracles instead of bloggers. Ahh... to be a world tourist.  Globetrotting fro...

Regular readers know that onshoring has been a favorite topic of ours.  Swimming upstream against the flow of lemmings chasing low labor costs around the globe to move manufacturing back to North America is a neat trick.  It's been helped lately by the weak dollar, but having the guts to l...

Last month we told you how Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought the rights to the IBM computer line, is moving manufacturing facilities out of China. Lenovo has decided to change its manufacturing strategy and will outsource the whole of its own-brand notebook production to Taiwan makers, accordi...

Exactly a year ago we told you how two small ski and sled companies had decided to outsource manufacturing to China.  For their low volumes it just didn't seem to make sense. ScottyBob's entire annual volume of few hundred pairs of skis would take up about 15% of a typical shipping container.&n...

Isn't it amazing how every issue, every situation, can have two distinct sides?  Which is why I often liken regulatory controls to pushing on a balloon... there will be an opposite reaction on some other side, and rarely are you lucky enough to guess where it might manifest itself. These days w...