1> If it's so easy, a new player will enter the market

2> If it's truly too expensive to ship the goods you want, you need to stop sourcing things astronomically far to be efficient. The same economic effect causing the the steel factory to be down the river from the mines is still in play.

This thread has some of the dumbest comments from people who obviously know nothing whatsoever about business. Lending validity to the Dunning-Kruger idea, people somehow think they actually know what they are talking about.

The above two comments fall under this category. And yet, I will address both of them in hopes that (1) someone will learn something and (2) others will refrain from posting comments about shit they know nothing about.

Having an opinion doesn't make it valid.

It would be like me posting about heart surgery. I would fully expect people to laugh I what I might say and let me know just how stupid I am to pretend I understand the subject --and rightly so.

Comment 1: Short version: Impossible.

The shipping industry, from 2020 until somewhere around 2022 was a complete mess. The cost of moving a container from Asia to the US (and anywhere else) rose by a factor of 10x to 15x. From approximately USD $2,000 to somewhere in a range between $20K to $30K.

If you were shipping something other than to China, good luck. We had to ship a few crates to Singapore. Ocean freight that normally takes a couple of weeks was being quoted to require at least THREE MONTHS and at a very high price. Why? Because all shipping capacity got diverted to China.

We ended-up having to air-freight. Even that took a ridiculous amount of time. I don't even want to talk about how much more the shipment cost than normal air freight. It was a mess.

Ports were stacked with containers not going anywhere.

New players?

It takes three years or more to build a new ship at a cost of a hundred million dollars. That is, assuming a normal economy and supply chains. In the period between 2020 and 2022, good luck building anything at scale. Car manufacturers had to make cars without components and park them until they could get those components. To make a dent you'd need to build, I don't know, 100 to 500 ships, if not more. Which means making an investment between $10 billion and $50 billion. BTW, during difficult times like that, anyone taking an order to build such ships would likely charge a 25% to 50% premium. We are talking about a potential $75 billion investment.

That investment would result in ships being ready to sail not earlier than 2026. By that time, with things back to some version of normal, freight pricing would also return to a normal trading range. Which, in turn, likely means whoever made that investment would be facing bankruptcy and that CEO would also be out of a job for being a dumbshit.

Comment 2: Not sure how to reply to this other than to be surprised by the lack of connection to reality the comment reveals.

OK, well. We don't make anything in the US and Europe any more. Our supply chains are long. And there's no way around it.

Bring manufacturing back?

OK. Well, this will take decades. In some cases it is absolutely impossible. In other cases it would require 25 years of solid investment in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Do you actually think we can pull off anything even remotely close to this when we can't even build a high speed train across California. Our politicians have failed us for at least five decades. If we our nation was united and our politicians --all of them-- actually worked towards goals for the benefit of the nation and its people, maybe we could pull some portion of that back in 25 years. As we exist and behave today? No way in hell. Not happening. Ever.

During the pandemic, the world discovered that nobody could make N95 masks. One of the simplest products to manufacture. Not only could we not make the masks. We didn't make the machines that make the masks. And we didn't make the cloth needed to make the masks, or the machines that make the cloth.

People who are not in manufacturing don't really have a sense of just how bad things are in this sense. We can't make anything. If China decided to shut down exports for six months the world would descend into the dark ages. It's that bad.

So, yeah, comment <2> is just, well, being kind, misplaced.

Next time you post about something, be sure you actually know what you are talking about. Don't be like me talking about open heart surgery. Good for comedy, and not much more than that.