Name: サプライチェーンの専門家だけど「中国の製造業」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2026-02-03T18:24:30.000Z
Duration: 28 min 44 s
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I'm a supply chain expert who helps founders start, scale and exit their businesses.

Let's answer your questions from the Internet.

Me trying to figure out how Temuo can afford a commercial every break when my cart of 104,564 items cost 90 cents.

Answer, your information is more valuable than the items.

It used to be for the longest time that China and Chinese factories would produce everything but the brands were Western people wanted something that denoted quality, something that was familiar to them.

And so even though it may be completely produced in China, if it had Nike or Adidas or something like that, you felt better about it.

What temu's done is it's not really a marketplace, it's actually a demand aggregation platform.

They're going to these factories and saying, hey, we want to make sure that your manufacturing lines are running.

And so what they do is they go out and they acquire customers and, and

they have gamification where they're able to basically sell that excess capacity.

And so the key thing is if I was going to lose money anyways by keeping my factory idle, if I can make a dollar by selling a widget, I'm going to do that all day, every day.

If you look at temu, you'll see that what they offer changes from time to time.

This is those factories with excess capacity saying, hey, I can make a car charger or I can make some gloves and just saying I have this amount that's available.

And then TEMU goes through and prices accordingly to make sure that they're able to move that inventory.

And TEMU is a fascinating case study in just how a modern Chinese first brand has really locked onto the Western consumer to solve a capacity issue that China would have had if they had only been reliant on Western brands.

And so when I'm buying a pair of gloves for 90 cents, the likelihood that that factory had the best labor laws, the best outputs, the best sustainability capabilities is, is probably not 100%.

The other part is that these, this factory ecosystem is extremely competitive.

And you look at Shein is another one that has just built this ecosystem where these factories are constantly vying for demand and volume and things like that because they operate on razor thin margins.

And so the name of the game is to make sure that they are pushing product out.

As soon as the product stops going out, then they run into an issue where they're, they're Underwater, they're losing money.

And so they will do next to anything just to make sure that their factories can running, that they can stay afloat.

Dankdubies420 asked if everything you own that was made in China, suddenly van what would you have left?

There is one bucket of things that would still come from China that we wouldn't be able to get access to.

This would be things like consumer electronics.

So I'm not talking about just cell phones, but chargers, cables, those things.

You'd be unable to get them because there is so much density and capital efficiency that goes into producing them at scale that you can't just pick up that factory because it's a whole ecosystem of manufacturers that's missing the second bucket, which would be the biggest bucket.

They may not be completely produced in China, but

they have significant subcomponents and raw materials that come from there.

So a good example would be apparel and footwear.

Even though Vietnam, India, Bangladesh produce a lot of apparel products, these sorts of things are dependent on a Chinese supply chain.

And so you might expect these to be 80 to 100% more expensive if we didn't have Chinese support.

And lastly, there are some things that the US can produce and would produce and would be fine with.

And these are going to be things like defense, aerospace, weapons, things that are highly automated that you could literally pick up the machine and move over because it doesn't require a whole lot of labor and it's fairly strategic.

Sam Datatola1 said so that's why I can't tell the difference between a good Chinese knockoff and the real deal.

A lot of people, when they look at something that's made in China, they will naturally think that it's low quality, cheap, not very durable.

And that may be true for some categories even today.

But as they have moved up the quality ecosystem, a lot of products coming from China are fantastic.

And this is why a lot of big brands only source from China.

You know, naturally when I see that something comes from France or Italy, I'm just assuming that it's better.

And that is a psychology thing, that's a branding thing.

I think earlier in 2025, when the trade war first heated up, there was this big push toward Chinese factories in particular, exposing the luxury suppliers that they were supporting.

They take almost finished bags from China factories and just do the repackaging and logo.

That was kind of a conscious effort that a lot of trade Associations said say, hey, if you're going to put tariffs on us, then we're going to go after and puncture this veil that you have of, you know, Chinese goods being so low quality and basically showing, hey, I've got something that is 95% of the way done.

Yeah, they may put the label on in qa but it's pretty good.

And so I think it was part of the geopolitical tool bag that China had to try to show that the west needed China.

But it was also a way that they could show that they had higher quality capabilities than what most people thought.

You know, I think that had the trade war not started then they probably would have kept that secret a little bit longer.

But this was the opportunity they were waiting for to show the world that they can make really high quality stuff.

Aboon GM1 asked, why do you think Chinese government ban Nvidia, intel and chips now in China?

The reality is, is that China wants these chips and it was the US that put the export controls on there saying, hey, we're not going to let you have these top of the line pieces.

A lot of this is geopolitical, a real concern that if China were to win in AI, that that would probably be the death knell in terms of American hegemony.

And so by restricting these top of the line chips, what we were trying to do was to give US companies a couple year head start.

And what it's done is kind of a bit of a back where China is still going to innovate, they're going to still be investing in AI and they are now pushing their own companies to develop something because their AI companies don't have Nvidia as an option.

And so the best thing that the US could have done actually is to continue to sell Nvidia or Intel chips, but

maybe keep them a model or two below the cutting edge, these to keep the lock in so that these companies would still build and be dependent on these US designed chips.

Whereas now we've kind of created the situation where in a couple of years China will have chips that are probably as good as Nvidia's chips if not beginning to compete or out compete them.

Asian afares asked how is damn near everything made in China?

When you go to China you've got certain cities that are known for electronics, certain cities that are known for apparel, certain cities that are known for zippers.

This is because of the way that China built and nurtured these, these ecosystems.

When companies came to Shenzhen, which was a fishing village 40 years ago, which is now, I think, the fastest growing city in the planet.

This is because they initially invited a company in, Apple, among others, who decided that they were going to partner with a local contract manufacturer who's going to assemble their products.

And then because they needed all these other suppliers and start making these other things, that network was built.

So China is able to make everything because they have very tight interconnected ecosystems.

It's kind of like if you were going shopping and let's suppose you're having a dinner party and you want to serve pizza.

You could go to the butcher, you could go to the bakery, you could go to the farmer's market, or you could go to a supermarket that has all of those things.

China is kind of like the supermarket for these different things.

That's why, you know, there's, there's no place like China.

We worked a lot of companies that when the tariffs first were announced, they said, hey, I need to be ABC anywhere but China.

And so we worked with them and tried to find folks in Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, and

But a lot of these companies are now coming back to China because they recognize that it's not just about the, the person who's doing the final assembly, it's about all of the suppliers and having options and being able to iterate quickly.

So it is this entire ecosystem of people, products, machinery, regulations that allow them to be very diverse in the areas that they want to be at.

A Quora user asked which countries, if any, are close to being able to compete with China in terms of manufacturing costs and quality.

It really depends on which industry you're looking at.

The US is looking to invest heavily into defense related industries, semiconductors, those sorts of things.

So when I say semiconductor, I'm really talking about all of the chips that go into every product that we have that has an electronic pulse.

Today there are some cutting edge chips like you'd see AI chips that can do AI models, but

really the majority of the chips are things that power your toaster, your oven, things like that.

The CHIPS act, which was announced in the Biden administration was about a $55 billion investment.

However, China has had $50 billion invested by Western companies each year for the last 20 years.

I think that when it comes to competing with China, we have to be very clear about where a country wants to compete.

I don't think the intention here is to become the number one exporter of cell phone cables.

But the reality is is that there are certain things that when you look at them from a geopolitical lens, you want to be able to do it.

And then from there they need to put the industrial policy in place.

This means being a guaranteed buyer of some capacity.

It means making it very easy for these factories to be built, for the regulations to be curtailed.

So you're still protecting the environment, but

making it so that you're only going through one environmental review versus six.

China endured 20 to 25 years of pain in terms of low margin, lots of investment before they got to a point where they are now.

And so any country that's going to look to do that has to be willing to go through a similar level of pain because it isn't as simple as placing an order on Amazon and having a new industry.

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サプライチェーンの専門家だけど「中国の製造業」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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