In a recent NYSE interview, a reporter asked me if my focus on Made-in-America manufacturing makes me afraid of having to compete with the cost of China manufacturing goods. My response surprised her.
“Not at all,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it is highly possible for Made-in-America pricing to be at parity or even lower than the cost of China-made goods.”
Here’s why: Automation addresses an old competitive disadvantage while simultaneously creating a new advantage.
THE NEW ADVANTAGE
America has spent decades assuming that manufacturing migrated overseas because American labor was too expensive. That assumption was once true, but automation has changed the equation. When labor becomes a smaller percentage of unit cost, the issues of location, transportation, inventory, quality, supply-chain resilience, speed, and intellectual-property control (all of which we can control) become much more important.
But we face a conundrum: We still need people, but automation changes the nature of the people we need.
That includes the humans who manage and control the automation. It also includes the electricians, welders, engineers, and other skilled trades that form the base of the manufacturing pyramid. The need for these roles is greater than ever before.
Consider the current statistics:
U.S. industrial robot installations increased 11% in 2025 to roughly 38,000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects nearly 1 million production-job openings annually from 2024 through 2034, largely because workers retire or leave occupations. BLS also expects industrial machinery mechanics—the people who maintain increasingly automated plants—to be one of manufacturing’s strongest growth occupations.
AUTOMATION PLUS HUMAN INFRASTRUCTURE
There is an interesting paradox at play. America is becoming more automated, but China is not standing still. China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, versus about 34,000 in the U.S., and China now has at least 2 million deployed. So, automation alone will not give America a competitive advantage. What automation does is give U.S. manufacturers the ability to neutralize disadvantages that once appeared structural, but only if we deploy it aggressively and build sufficient human infrastructure around it.
The process works like this: Historically, the assumption has been that if labor costs are dramatically lower somewhere else, that’s where manufacturing belongs. But automation compresses the labor component of unit economics. Now the calculation bypasses wages and moves to the total cost of production.
Executives should understand that a lights-out factory is not a people-free factory. Someone must design, integrate, power, program, repair, and continuously improve the factory to ensure its success. The result:
- Specialized workers are a new constraint: Due to automation, nearshoring, and other key factors, American manufacturing may outrun its supply of electricians, engineers, technicians, welders, and other specialized workers.
- Skilled trades as critical infrastructure: U.S. vulnerability lies in treating skilled trades as yesterday’s economy when, in fact, they’re critical infrastructure for the AI/robotics economy.
What to do?Companies thinking about reshoring today should evaluate automation + talent + supply chain simultaneously, rather than first deciding where to manufacture and then figuring out automation later.
THE FACTORY OF THE FUTURE
This country needs differently skilledworkers to fuel our next growth era. This requires continuing education and training of today’s workforce to prepare as many as possible for increasingly lucrative roles.
Tomorrow’s winner will be the system that converts raw materials into finished goods at the lowest risk-adjusted total cost, not simply the factory with the cheapest labor.
Parity with China’s manufacturing costs will come from automation, talent, and total-cost considerations. That is a competition America can enter on very different terms than it could 20 years ago. If we address this well, and I believe we can, the issue of parity with China’s manufacturing prices will resolve itself.
Matthew Chang is founder and principal engineer of Chang Robotics.