Dispatch from Shenzhen

Wow.  We’ve been in Shenzhen, China for only a few days and there is already way too much to talk about in one post.  As you know, faithful reader, Dave and I are in China thanks to Chumby’s Bunnie Huang and the geek tour ‘09 - a trip which is in large part being generously hosted by PCH.  We have visited plastic factories, electronics factories, textile factories and shoelace factories.  We have visited fabric markets, electronics markets and very gray cellphone markets.   Our goal is to better understand how to manufacture hardware products at scale but we are learning so much more.

The city is electric, crowded and modern in the extreme.  Things are happening here - everyone has read about 6,000 articles on China, but visiting truly makes it clear that the country is pulsing with vitality, creativity and drive.  People are not messing around!

One clear impression I can relate is just the scale and volume of activity, especially at the factories.  They are enormous.  There are thousands of workers.  The machines are immense.  From gritty, low-tech, Victorian-seeming machines to curvaceous robotic printed circuit board assemblers, I was amazed by how much STUFF is getting made.

One factory makes 220 kilometers of velcro a day.  And that is just one among a horde of factories in this one province.  They’re not doing it for fun - it all sells!

A second impression is the amount of value getting squeezed out of everything.  If there is money to be made at something, it is getting made, by big players and small.  People throw away their mobile phones in the U.S. - some might recycle them.  But once they are busted or deemed unfashionable, they exit the scene.

Here, there are vast markets of phones being torn down and sold for parts.  You can find - and buy - every little bit in the phone that makes it go.  These markets seem to exist for every product under the sun.  There do not seem to be any large scale operations to collect and recycle products.  In many of the market stalls, there’s just a guy with a box of phones and a soldering iron, taking phones apart one by one and putting the guts in the display case right then and there.  It’s all pretty unofficial, and it is thriving.

So wow.  More thoughts soon - it’s hard to process it all.