“Perceptions are changing in the global industries,” said Sukand Ramachandran,
a partner at the Boston Consulting Group in London. “There is a growing
realisation that, all other things being equal, it may be more effective to
manufacture your goods close to your customers. That trend has been apparent
in the US for about a year and a half and we’re now starting to see it in
Europe too.”
Mr Ramachandran highlighted the aerospace and automotive industries as two in
which the trend towards “onshoring” has been most pronounced. He pointed to
the acquisition of Jaguar Land Rover by India’s Tata Motors in 2008. At the
time this raised concerns that jobs and investment would be shipped off to
Asia. In fact, the reverse has been true with the company investing in a
number of facilities in the UK and creating an additional 1,700 jobs at its
Solihull facility by next year.
The BCG study looked at a number of factors, including labour and energy, to
compare the manufacturing costs of the 25 top exporting countries in the
world relative to the US. Many of the traditional high-cost countries in
Europe have lost further ground in the past decade due to weak productivity
growth and rising energy costs, according to the study. These include
France, Italy, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland.
Source Article from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11042217/Britain-is-now-the-lowest-cost-manufacturing-economy-of-Western-Europe.html
