Molson Hart

China does not need to be "replaced" by a single country. It can be replaced by Southeast Asia in general. Whether or not scale is a problem is highly dependent on the particular supply chain of an item.

Just take a look at a desktop or laptop. Apple moved the new Mac Pro manufacturing to China. Why? The same answer applies to almost all industries: supply chain, logistics, scale. At the end of the day, you can try to move assembly to countries like Thailand and M'sia but

The bulk of intermediate goods will be shipped from China. Why? Because bulk of non-US bound goods will still be made there (cost efficiency). Indonesia is the only country in Asean that has the population but it has NO infrastructure.

I lived in the region for 30+ years. I know what each country has to offer. There will be no efficiency. Just to prove a point, Asean has also outsouced to China.

SEA's supply chain is getting better every year. Yes, most of the products made in SEA today include significant imported subcomponents from China, but it gets less and less every year. At the same time, China's workers are fewer, older, and relatively more expensive.

Dude, they are sending intermediates to China to be assembled. Which part of outsourcing to China did you not understand?? Assembly in general (in Malaysia and Thailand) are not that cheap and Indonesia just doesn't have the infra. Lets not talk abt SG.

Vietnam has already hit capacity while Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are so backward they can only take low cost high labour industries in small doses.

India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia - what is that? almost 2 billion people? It's a big region and while the infrastructure is worse than China's it's workable.