Meanwhile, labor costs in China long the world's low-cost factory floor have been rising rapidly.
Workers in Gorseinon were also hit by the closure of the Valeo car components factory in 2001 which cost 330 jobs.
So a funny thing happened to the GeoSpring on the way from the cheap Chinese factory to the expensive Kentucky factory: The material cost went down.
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And to help meet that goal, this master of lean manufacturing is experimenting with a new cost-saving factory setup that it hopes to deploy around the world--while competitors are just now catching up with its last-generation manufacturing innovations.
As a result, even if your uninspired work down at the cracker factory yielded nothing more than cost-of-living raises over the past 40 years, you would become more susceptible to the AMT over time purely because the exemption was not increasing in lock-step with your wages.
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Lishen received millions in subsidies and hundreds of acres of low-cost land to build a factory.
"We are protesting about pensions, emergency taxes, the high cost of life, " retired factory worker Kyriakos Anastassiadis told the Associated Press.
Boeing has also outsourced some work in Kansas, after selling one of its main factories to a Canadian private-equity firm, from which it buys fuselage sections at lower cost than when it owned the factory.
He also plans to start raising private money for the second factory in the second half of this year since the loan guarantee, which will translate into a government loan, will cover roughly half of the cost of building and outfitting the factory.
Boeing cut the cost of making fuselages by selling a factory in Wichita to a private-equity consortium, which drastically cut costs.
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Car buyers pay for labour, steel and paint, but the price sticker may not reflect the full cost of the noxious goo the car factory spills into a river.
Techniques to keeping the build cost down, reducing the time from factory to the shop floor (and on to customer) and working with suppliers to support the development of new technology in exchange for long term exclusives on the results, they have all played their part.
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The clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed hundreds spotlights the human cost of Westerners' cheap clothing.
Most of the savings came not from trimming labor (10% of cost) but from getting parts to the factory floor faster and improving production flow.
Don't just benchmark European companies' supply chains--look at what Renault is doing in India, where its new factory has opened the door to many new low-cost suppliers.
The council-funded charity, which employs about 70 members of staff, faces closure or remodelling of its factory into a training centre, as as part of cost cuts.
When changes are made the algorithms make engineering adjustments, calculate the cost and send a bill of materials to the factory floor.
First Solar, long the king of low-cost manufacturing, decided to gradually shut down its big factory in Germany and put on hold its plans to build new factories in Vietnam and Arizona.
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Working continuously seven days a week, this mini-factory can produce a million tyres a year, at an overall cost one-quarter less than that of a mid-size traditional plant, which might produce 6m tyres a year.
But until now, no company could cost-effectively produce large OLED screens because of constraints in factory processes.
The savings are arrestingly simple: Redesigning a standard pumping loop in one factory saved 92% of the pumping power--with lower construction cost and better performance.
Foxconn's cost advantages from scale have waned as it works to improve factory conditions after a spate of high-profile worker suicides and accidents in recent years.
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Last week, Suntech announced the closure of its U.S. factory in Goodyear, Arizona, and the elimination of 43 jobs as a cost-cutting measure.
The plug-and-play solution minimizes engineering effort and civil requirements and lowers initial cost, scheduling, technical, permitting and financing risks with its factory-tested components and GE warranties.
Fiat opened the factory in Poland in the early 70s, where presumably labor and operations were more cost effective under communist leadership.
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For example, for the same capital cost and ROI, LED lighting may be beneficial in a New Jersey factory, while a new water management system may provide more bang for the buck in a similar factory in California.
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While Dr. Gawande has provided a wonderful revealing portrait of cost-effective, fast, food preparation and delivery at the CheeseCake Factory , he has focused on the process of creating the meal, not the process of deciding what meal to make.
Many factory owners who couldn't afford to build new buildings because of the high cost of land and limited access to utilities converted hundreds of residential and other buildings into makeshift garment factories to keep up with the demand from Western retailers, labor groups say.
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Different sorts of low-cost robots are also emerging that do not look at all like the bulky beams of factory robots.
The family speaks about its responsibilities to the farmers, the requests for money or more work, the cost of the free medical care the hacienda provides, the training they offer, the factory jobs they are trying to create in a new industrial estate.
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