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As Jobs Move East, Plants in Mexico Retool to Compete
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China Takes Low-Wage Work, So Guadalajara Targets Products Still Made in U.S.
Beating Boise’s Router Maker
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By David Luhnow ~ The Wall Street Journal ~ March 5, 2004
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Guadalajara, Mexico - When Ernesto Sanchez became the manager of the sprawling Jabil Circuit Inc. electronics factory here in February 2001, the factory was racing to fill its highest volume of orders ever.
But only a month after moving into his new office, orders at the plant had fallen 10%. By May, output of the factory, which makes products for Dell Inc., Nokia Corp. and others, was down 40% - part of a blindingly fast shift in global manufacturing production to lower-cost China. Mr. Sanchez felt helpless.
Nearly three years later, the 37-year-old electrical engineer and his factory have pulled off a remarkable turnaround. Instead of trying to win back orders lost to competitors and other Jabil factories in China, Mr. Sanchez set his sights on the U.S., where he still has a big edge on wage costs. By pursuing more complex products traditionally made by smaller plants in the U.S., such as computer routers and hand-held credit-card machines used by waiters, he has replaced all the business lost to China. After watching his work force of 3,500 dwindle to half that number by the summer of 2002, the factory now employs nearly 3,900.
"We realized we couldn’t compete with China’s labor cost. We needed to compete as a North American factory. After all, that’s where we are," says Mr. Sanchez. A native of Mexico with an M.B.A. from Central Michigan University, he cut his teeth working for International Business Machines Corp.’s Mexico unit for eight years.
To make his plant more competitive, he trained workers to do more than one task at a time , retooled the plant’s inventory system and had the cafeteria remodeled to keep workers happy. Now, as he proudly walks amid rows of busy assembly lines, Mr. Sanchez says his plant rivals any competitor north of the border.
Mr. Sanchez is on the leading edge of an important new development in global outsourcing. Factories in Mexico long were winners in the flow of labor around the world, as many U.S. companies relocated there to take advantage of lower wage costs.
So, Mr. Sanchez and other managers are moving their factories up the manufacturing food chain, retooling to make more advanced products. Now they are competing against factories in developed economies such as the U.S. that earlier thought they were safe from foreign competition. Mr. Sanchez attracted many of his new orders from another Jabil facility in Boise, Idaho - prompting Jabil to close the plant in September 2002 and lay off its 500 employees. The factory was only two years old.
"China makes you sharp or it kills you," says Eslie Sykes, manager of a Flextonics Inc. plant a few miles away from Jabil’s facility in this city best known for its fiery tequila and Mariachi musicians. After a lull in activity for the past two years, Mr. Sykes’s one-million-square-foot plant is now poaching higher-end work from Ireland and France. One of his factory’s newer products, a data storage system for a U.S. based electronics company, uses 91 customized screws.
Double Threat
What’s happening in Mexico illustrates how globalization is a double threat to blue-collar workers in wealthy countries such as the U.S. as low skill factory jobs migrate directly to China and countries such as Mexico accelerate their competitiveness for their own survival. By playing the role of upstart global entrepreneur, China isn’t just drawing in jobs but forcing factories throughout the rest of the world to become more efficient. "It’s Economics 101 in action," says Claudio Bertoluz, head of Mexico’s electronics manufacturing association.
While the loss of jobs to China has become a hot political issue in the U.S., nowhere has China’s economic emergence been felt more sharply than in Mexico. In the past three years, Mexico lost an estimated 400,000 jobs to China and was replaced by China as the No. 2 exporter to the U.S. market, behind Canada. The lost exports cost Mexico at least $5.8 billion in 2002, Credit Suisse First Boston estimated recently.
China’s rise caught Mexico unprepared. Having signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, Mexico rode its privileged access to the world’s biggest market to become the globe’s sixth-biggest exporter by 2000 - placing Mexico and China as the only developing countries in the top ten exporters. The electronics industry in Guadalajara saw its exports soar five-fold to $10 billion from 1994 to 2000. But the boom and a stronger peso drove up average hourly wages to above $3 per hour in 2002 from half that level in 1998. Other Mexican industries saw a similar rise.
Success bred complacency, and, while wages rose, productivity lagged. Mexico has failed to enact a single major economic initiative in six years. Attempts to introduce competition to the state-run energy sector have failed in a hostile national legislature. So companies pay twice the rate for energy as their rivals in China. President Vicente Fox’s effort to plug holes in Mexico’s leaky tax system also flopped - meaning the government will continue to be chronically short of cash to invest in crucial infrastructure. Mexico also never developed local suppliers for its assembly industries, relying on imported components to assemble here for export.
‘Hecho en China’
Now, competitiveness with China is an obsession in Mexico . Much as the economic rivalry with Japan entered the American consciousness in the 1970s, Mexicans view China as a major threat. Newspapers prod such anxiety with stories about iconic Mexican goods such as statuettes of the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe now bearing the offending label "Hecho en China" or "Made in China."
Partly in response to those worries, Mexico recently repealed a 4% salary tax, and reduced corporate taxes over the past three years to 32% from 35%. To lower the cost of raw materials, it cut import tariffs on a range of key products, such as steel, from non-NAFTA countries. Cities in Chihuahua and Baja California are giving away land to companies, and some states offer tax breaks for research and development spending.
Mexico’s manufacturing costs now account for about 13% of the price of a product in dollar terms, down from about 20% three years ago, despite rising wages. After falling for several years, Mexico moved up six spots to 47th in the latest ranking of global competitiveness by the World Economic Forum.
During the first nine months of last year, foreign direct investment in Mexico’s manufacturing sector rose 13%, compared with the year-earlier period, despite a global decline in such investments.
Farm-equipment maker Deere & Company said last month it is moving parts-assembly work to Monterrey, Mexico, from Ankeny, Iowa. Sweden’s Electrolux AB recently decided to relocate its Greenville, Michigan plant to Mexico.
The Flextronics factory in Guadalajara now makes steel communications cabinets sold by Canada’s Nortel Networks in the U.S. market. Previously the products were made in France.
The Flextronics plant also houses the company’s only product-testing center outside its headquarters in San Jose, California. Six employees put devices through tests simulating 100 days wear and tear in one day and predict failure rates for different products.
"We do the same stuff as San Jose but at a third of the price," says the center’s director, Joao Ofenboeck. To attract such high-end investment, Mexico’s federal government gives a 50% tax break and Jalisco state, home to Guadalajara, gives an additional 30%.
Guadalajara’s electronics factories have also learned to leverage Mexico’s most obvious advantage: location. U.S. retailers such as Best Buy Co. want delivery of products to replace items as soon as they leave store shelves. Rather than produce those goods in China, and wait weeks for replacements or new designs to show up at stores, they turn to factories in nearby Mexico.
Consider the molded plastic parts made by Flextronics for Whirlpool Corp. washing machines. As sales of particular models - or colors - rise or fall, retailers such as Best Buy update an internal inventory system that Mr. Sykes checks on his laptop every morning. He can immediately ramp up or slow down production of particular parts or styles, and new moldings can be delivered in days.
"The gate the Chinese can’t close is time and distance," says Mr. Sykes. "We’ve learned to exploit that."
How to seize upon such advantages wasn’t obvious to Jabil until the U.S. economy fell into recession in 2001. Based in St. Petersburg, Florida, Jabil and other contract manufacturers rose in the early 1990s by making products sold by better-known firms, such as Hewlett-Packard Co. printers and 3Com Palm Pilots. Contract manufacturers allow the brand-name companies to move away from making things and focus on developing and marketing new products. As recently as the late 1990s, Jabil made 75% of its products in the U.S. But driven by cost pressures, that percentage has fallen to between 15% and 20%, according to Jabil Chief Operating Officer Mark Mondello.
For years, Jabil’s plant in Guadalajara and the surrounding electronics industry were hailed as a model for the industrialization of Mexico. But suddenly U.S. companies began aggressively seeking even-lower factory costs. Within a year, nearly every product coming out of Mr. Sanchez’s facility had been moved to Jabil’s seven plants in China. As he watched empty floor space grow and signed workers’ pink slips, he stayed up nights wondering how the factory could compete.
Pricier Products
Over a period of months, Mr. Sanchez and Mr. Mondello discussed how to respond to the China threat. Slowly, the pair realized that if Jabil lowered costs by moving commodity-type products from the Mexico plant to China, they could also save by moving more expensive products from the U.S. to Mexico.
In January 2003, Mr. Mondello gave the go-ahead for the plant in Mexico to try making a more complicated product - the router for Nokia then made in Boise, Idaho. Building a router, a small box that directs computer traffic across a network and often has more than 3,000 parts, is daunting. Since many of the machines are customized (a router for the U.K. market needs a different power cord, for instance), Mr. Sanchez had to overhaul his assembly lines to allow workers to quickly switch components, software and engineering diagrams.
At first, the shift to Mexico looked like a bad call. Accustomed to longer production runs of standardized products, the factory’s inventory system couldn’t keep up with more complicated items. Assembly lines idled as workers waited for circuit boards and other spare parts. Mr. Sanchez kept assigning more engineers to find out why parts were missing, driving up costs. He flew a pair of workers to Boise and had technicians from the idle U.S. plant visit Mexico.
For three months, Mr. Sanchez and his engineers worked to smooth out the kinks, often staying at the factory late into the night, chugging black coffee. One engineer manually checked inventory three times a day to make sure the correct parts were in place. By the fourth month, the Guadalajara factory had beaten every record that the Boise facility held for quality, on-time delivery, and cost, the company says. Moreover, the spare-parts tracking software that Mr. Sanchez’s computer technicians developed is now Jabil’s global standard.
"You learn pretty quickly when you are up every night at 3 a.m.," says Mr. Sanchez.
By early this year, the factory had 17 customers. It was churning out more than 600 products - from Internet firewalls to electronic controls for washing machines - and tracking 12,000 parts. That compares with just five customers less than two years earlier, when the factory produced only 215 finished goods and worked with 5,000 parts.
In order to train workers for the more complex processes those products require, Mr. Sanchez needed to lower the factory’s employee turnover - a constant problem in Mexico as workers move on to better-paying jobs or leave for the U.S. So Mr. Sanchez meets with line workers every three months to hear suggestions or complaints. The employee cafeteria now offers a wide range of food, including sushi and cappuccino. Every three months, workers nominate colleagues who embody the company’s values - concepts such as teamwork, honesty and execution. Supervisors pick winners who get pins and their names posted on a bulletin board. Turnover is down to 2% a month, from 5% a month in late 202.
Carlos Hernandez is one of those sticking around. The 23-year-old used to weld the same computer chip in place hundreds of times a day on a circuit board. Now, he welds into place five or six different components and test the board to make sure everything is working - a task that used to require an electrical engineer. Mr. Hernandez says he wants still more responsibility, despite his sixth-grade education: "This job is a lot more interesting," he says. |
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