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U.S. Manufacturing Becoming Low Cost

U.S. Manufacturing Becoming Low Cost

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Manufacturing Low Cost

Picture Eugene Hoshiko, File/Associated Press

U.S. manufacturing becoming low cost over the past decade compared with factories in China, Brazil and most of the world’s other major economies.

So says a new private study, which found that rising wages and higher energy costs have diminished China’s long-standing edge over the United States. So has a boom in U.S. shale gas production. It’s reduced U.S. natural gas prices and slowed the cost of electricity.

The Boston Consulting Group is issuing a report on its study of manufacturing costs in the 25 biggest exporting countries. Only seven of those countries had lower manufacturing costs than the United States did this year. And since 2004, U.S. manufacturers have improved their competitiveness compared with every major exporter except India, Mexico and the Netherlands.In 2004, for example, manufacturing in China cost 14 percent less than manufacturing in the United States. By this year, the China advantage had narrowed to 5 percent. If the trends continue, Boston Consulting found, U.S. manufacturing will be less expensive than China’s by 2018.

Over the past decade, labor costs, adjusted to reflect productivity gains, shot up 187 percent at factories in China, compared with 27 percent in the United States. The value of China’s currency has risen more than 30 percent against the U.S. dollar over the past decade.

The higher Chinese currency made goods produced in China and sold abroad comparatively more expensive. And foreign goods became comparatively more affordable in China.

Chinese electricity costs rose 66 percent, more than double the United States’ 30 percent increase. The start of large-scale U.S. shale gas production in 2005 has helped contain electricity bills in the United States and neighboring Canada and Mexico.

China, too, has reserves for shale gas. But it will need years to develop them.

“This is not something you can turn on overnight,” said Justin Rose, a partner at Boston Consulting and co-author of the study.

Brazil has lost even more ground than China. In 2004, manufacturing was 3 percent cheaper in Brazil than in the United States. By 2014, Brazil was 23 percent more expensive. Brazilian factories didn’t improve efficiency enough to offset rising energy and labor costs.

The countries where manufacturing was cheaper than in the United States are Indonesia, India, Mexico, Thailand, China, Taiwan and Russia.

Australia was the most expensive country for manufacturing. Its costs were 30 percent higher than those in the United States.

The survey doesn’t include transportation costs, which vary depending on where goods are shipped. Several countries also face obstacles not captured by Boston Consulting’s manufacturing cost index — from corruption to inefficient government bureaucracies.

SOURCE:  Washington Post

We Need To Save The Internet

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save the internet

We need to save the internet.Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon want to control what we can and cannot do online — and they’re about to get their wish.

Their lobbyists and lawyers have taken over the FCC — the agency meant to keep them in check. Now, the former lobbyist running the FCC is about to announce new rules that will kill Net Neutrality — the rule that stops Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon from deciding which sites you’re allowed to visit.

There are two specific subcommittees in Congress that could stop this decision before its officially proposed on May 15th, or even overturn it.

Sign the petition to the two congressional subcommittees: Stop the FCC and save the internet.The proposed FCC rules would change the internet from what we know now to something more like corporate television — a place where faster internet would be reserved for the giant corporations willing to pay to cut the line. 

Right now, the internet works like this: both people and websites pay money to their local (often monopolistic) Internet Service Provider (ISP) like Comcast or Verizon. In return, they’re hooked up to the internet. Information flowing through the internet is all treated equally. Under these new rules, the ISPs could hold us hostage. Verizon could refuse to let us see Youtube unless Google hands them wheelbarrows full of cash. People researching medications might not be able to find the studies showing serious side effects if Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKlein and others pay big bucks to get their sites to show up fastest. Most alarmingly, the legal basis of these rules could allow ISPs to censor any site they didn’t like.

Groups like SumOfUs only exist because of the open internet of today. Under these new rules, new innovations would find it much harder to take off, because their superior design would be behind an intentionally broken and slow connection. Sites like Wikipedia could disappear from public view or start plastering themselves in ads to pony up the cash needed to pay Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon for the privilege of allowing us to access them.

The head of the FCC is a former lobbyist and telecommunications executive, and he’s hired Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T corporate flacks into the FCC specifically to draft rules for destroying the internet. No wonder they love his proposal.

This is an all-hands on deck moment.  

Sign the petition to the House and Senate committees overseeing the FCC. We can’t let Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T get away with destroying the internet. 

U.S. Businesses Being Destroyed Faster Than Being Created

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The American economy is less entrepreneurial now than at any point in the last three decades. That’s the conclusion of a new study out from the Brookings Institution, which looks at the rates of new business creation and destruction since 1978.
Not only that, but during the most recent three years of the study — 2009, 2010 and 2011 — businesses were collapsing faster than they were being formed, a first. Overall, new businesses creation (measured as the share of all businesses less than one year old) declined by about half from 1978 to 2011.
The authors don’t mince words about the stakes here: If the decline persists, “it implies a continuation of slow growth for the indefinite future.” This lack of economic dynamism, particularly the steep drop since 2006, may be one reason why our current recovery has felt like much less than a recovery. As Matt O’Brien noted on Wonkblog last week, annual job growth rates have stubbornly refused to budge above 2 percent for the duration of the recovery.The authors of the Brookings study dug beyond the national numbers to look at the change in new firms at the state and metro levels and found that they generally mirrored the national trends.

I mapped the state data below. While all states showed steep drops in new firms, New York stands out for its much smaller decline in the share of new companies than other states — only 18 percent, compared with the 50-state average of 47.2 percent. Illinois, Texas, New Jersey and Missouri round out the top five.

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SOURCE: Robert Litan (The Brookings Institution) and Ian Hathaway (Ennsyte Economics). GRAPHIC: The Washington Post. Published May 5, 2014.
At the other end, Alaska had the largest drop in new business, at 61 percent. Hawaii, Vermont, New Mexico and Wyoming rounded out the bottom five. Teasing out the causes of the overall decline or the variation between states is difficult; the authors stressed to me that their data don’t answer the questions of why or how just yet. But they will be looking into that in the months ahead.No immediate pattern emerges from the state-level geography, but one thing is worth nothing. For kicks I tried to correlate the drops in new businesses in each state with the states’ scores on the Tax Foundation’s 2014 State Business Tax Climate Index. There was no significant relationship one way or the other. For example, New York, which showed the lowest decrease in new businesses, actually scored dead last in the Tax Foundation’s ranking. Wyoming had one of the largest declines, even though it ranked first in the Tax Foundation’s report.

At the very least, the Brookings findings strongly suggest that when it comes to luring new businesses to a given state, there are a lot more factors at play than straightforward calculations of corporate tax rates.

The Hidden Weakness in This Month’s Jobs Report

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The good news from the April jobs report is that the recovery is the same as it’s always been. The bad news is that, well, the recovery is the same as it’s always been — and some workers are giving up as they realize that.
As you may have noticed, this winter was pretty cold. So cold, in fact, that the economy might have ground to a halt, as shoppers stayed home and home-building stayed weak. The initial estimate of first-quarter GDP growth was a miserable 0.1 percent — and that was after a string of disappointing jobs numbers to start the year. That’s why the April employment report was such a relief: The economy added 288,000 jobs (the most in any single month since January 2012), 36,000 more in revisions, and the unemployment rate fell from 6.7 to 6.3 percent.That sounds like unambiguously good news. But beneath the headlines, the recovery doesn’t look quite so robust. The jobs report is really two different sets of data. There’s the establishment survey, which polls businesses about how many positions they added or lost to come up with the jobs number. And there’s the household survey, which polls households about how many of them have jobs, or are looking for one, to come up with the unemployment rate. In April, the establishment survey showed the economy bouncing back from its winter of discontent. But the household survey showed discontented workers getting discouraged and dropping out of the labor force.

Here’s the bad news: The labor force fell by 806,000 in April, and most of that was because fewer people entered it to begin with. Reentrants — people who have worked before and just started looking again — plummeted by 417,000. That’s the largest monthly drop, in absolute terms, on record going back to 1967.

It’s confounding, because a stronger labor market tends to suck people in, not push them away. Indeed, the labor force had been growing the past six months — up 1.6 million between October and March — before this reversal. The likeliest explanation is that the data got ahead of the trend and that this is just a correction.

Still, there was plenty more to be disappointed about. The average work week was unchanged last month. So were average hourly earnings. Both of those are pretty good predictors of future demand — and future hiring — so there’s not much hint of better times ahead. If anything, the economy looks like it will just keep chugging along at its 2 percent pace. You can see how consistently mediocre the recovery has been in the chart below. Job growth has been the same since 2012.

Let’s be clear: Adding 288,000 jobs is great. It would be even greater if it looked like that growth would continue, but it doesn’t, given the weak internal numbers. It’s likely that we’re now simply getting back to our earlier trend after the polar vortex had temporarily knocked us off.This still isn’t the recovery we’re looking for.

SOURCE:  Washington Post

U.S. Economy Adds 288,000 Jobs in April; Jobless Rate falls to 6.3%

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New government data released Friday morning showed the nation added 288,000 jobs in April, a reassuring sign that the U.S. economy has picked up momentum since stalling out over the winter.
The hiring spree surpassed most analysts’ expectations and is the strongest showing in more than two years. Businesses added workers across a broad array of sectors, including business services, retail and construction. The unemployment rate plunged to 6.3 percent — the lowest level since 2008 — though part of that was due to a shrinking labor force.The upbeat report provided a convincing counterpoint to data released earlier this week that revealed economic growth was virtually flat during the first quarter. Many analysts attributed that weak reading to the unusually cold winter and argued that a spring thaw is already underway. The Labor Department also increased its estimates of hiring during the previous two months by 36,000 net jobs.

“It’s just what the doctor ordered in terms of a further piece of confirmation that the winter was abnormal,” said Eric Lascelles, chief economist at RBC Global Asset Management. “We can just expect further economic normalization.”

Wall Street opened higher on the news, but the major U.S. indexes were mixed at mid-day. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average inched into the red, while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up slightly. The tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 0.2 percent.

The jobs report contained at least one ominous note. The nation’s workforce shrank by more than 800,000 workers in April, sending the labor force participation rate plummeting 0.4 percentage points to 62.8 percent. The Labor Department said most of that decline was due to fewer people joining the workforce.

“People are not giving up in the labor force,” U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez said in an interview. “That would be a fundamentally different diagnosis of where we are now.”
The number of re-entrants — people looking for a job after being out of the labor market — plunged by 417,000, the largest drop on record. New entrants declined by 126,000. Many high school and college students typically begin entering the job market in April, but the number of people younger than 25 in the workforce fell by 484,000. The participation rate for teens ages 16 to 19 hit the second-lowest level ever.

“I would actually say that this big drop in the unemployment rate is not consistent with a really robust labor market because that labor force participation rate did not rise, and the employment-to-population ratio is shockingly low,” said Tara Sinclair, an economics professor at George Washington University and economist at Indeed.com, one of the nation’s largest sites for job postings.

Another factor driving the smaller workforce could be the expiration of benefits for the long-term unemployed at the end of last year. To qualify for the payments, workers have to show they are looking for jobs. Without the incentive of unemployment benefits, many of them might have ended their search.

The U.S. Senate voted in April to extend unemployment benefits through May for workers who have been out of a job for six months or longer, but the measure faces a rocky road in the House. On Thursday, Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.), the bill’s sponsors, urged the House to move quickly.

“Emergency unemployment insurance is a lifeline for job seekers, and restoring it will strengthen the recovery by bolstering demand at a critical time,” Reed said.

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Friday’s data showed the number of long-term unemployed fell slightly to 3.5 million in April, accounting for roughly one-third of America’s jobless. Meanwhile, about 7.5 million people were in part-time jobs for economic reasons. Fed Chair Janet Yellen has cited those dynamics as reasons to keep the central bank’s benchmark short-term interest rate low for years to come.But the sharp drop in unemployment could complicate the Fed’s task. Several top officials, including San Francisco Fed President John Williams and Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart, have said they believe the first rate increase should come when the jobless rate falls to about 6 percent. Both officials had predicted that would not happen until next year, but that goal post is now much closer.

April’s pickup in hiring also helps validate the Federal Reserve’s decision this week to continue scaling back its support for the recovery. The nation’s central bank is reducing its monthly bond purchases by $10 billion to $45 billion — about half the amount it was pumping into the economy every month last year. The Fed has tied its stimulus to the health of the labor market, and Friday’s data clearly show it is improving.

The construction industry provided one of the biggest boosts to job creation last month. The sector added 32,000 jobs, concentrated in heavy and civil engineering and residential building. Over the past year, it has hired 189,000 workers, with the bulk of those gains coming within the last six months.

The main hiring engine was the professional and business services sector, which created 75,000 net jobs. Retailers and bars and restaurants each added more than 30,000 jobs. The health care industry gained 19,000 positions.

SOURCE:  Washington Post

China Could Overtake the U.S. as World’s No. 1 Economy This Year

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New data from the World Bank suggests China could surpass the U.S. as the world’s biggest economy as early as this year, a day that was always meant to arrive after China began its quest for wealth in the 1980s, but it will just veil the reality of its economic weaknesses
China’s economy is catching up to the U.S.’s much more quickly than anticipated. That’s according to a new report from the International Comparison Program of the World Bank.The study recalibrates GDP statistics based on updated estimates of “purchasing-power parity” — a measure of what money can actually buy in different economies. In the process, the economy of China comes out far larger than we had previously thought. Its GDP surges to $13.5 trillion in 2011 (the latest year available), compared with the $7.3 trillion calculated using exchange rates. That catapults China’s economy much closer to that of the U.S. — at $15.5 trillion. Forecasting ahead, these figures show that China could overtake America as the world’s largest economy as early as this year.

This day, of course, was always going to arrive. The ascent of China to the world’s No. 1 slot has been inevitable ever since the country embarked on its great quest for wealth in the 1980s. With a population heading toward 1.4 billion, the question has been when, not if, China will topple the U.S. from its lofty perch. Still, we can’t ignore the historic significance of that switch. The U.S. has been the globe’s unrivaled economic powerhouse for more than a century. The fact that China will replace the U.S. at the top is yet another signal of how economic and political clout is rapidly shifting to the East from the West.

That quickly gets everyone’s passions boiling over. To many Chinese, becoming No. 1 is vindication for what they feel has been two centuries of humiliation at the hands of an aggressive West and proof that its authoritarian, state-capitalist economic model is superior to the democratic, free-enterprise systems of the U.S. and Europe. In the U.S., losing the top spot is seen as a symbol of America’s decline on the world stage.

Yet we shouldn’t get ourselves too worked up. These new figures don’t mean as much as many people think. Leaving aside the obvious statistical questions the report raises about the value of GDP figures generally, where the U.S. and China rank misses the more important point: bigger isn’t necessarily better.

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A worker walks past a steel factory in Beijing on April 1, 2013

 

Even if China does become No. 1, that would just be a mask covering up the reality of the economy’s weaknesses. Some of the factors that have been driving GDP upward are also signs of China’s deteriorating economic health — investment in excess capacity, the construction of wasteful real estate projects and the buildup of crazy levels of debt. China is losing its cost competitiveness but still lags badly in the managerial expertise, technology and financial professionalism necessary to develop a truly advanced economy.Beijing’s leadership is embarking on an ambitious program of reform to make the state-led economy more market-oriented and give private business greater sway. But the challenges of implementing these reforms are huge and could cause a dramatic economic slowdown, or even worse. Many economists and analysts (myself included) have openly wondered if China is heading toward a full-blown financial crisis.

On the flip side, if the U.S. slips from its No. 1 position, it doesn’t spell doom. The U.S. still has a substantial lead in innovation, and its dominant position in many industries and sectors is not about to vanish. New York City will remain the world’s premier financial center, and the dollar will reign supreme on the world stage for some time to come. Still, wherever the U.S. ranks, its economy too is badly in need of reform. Better infrastructure, a smarter tax code, an improved education system and more determined efforts to close the income gap would also strengthen the economy’s foundation for growth.

SOURCE:  Time

America is Declining at the Same Warp Speed That's Minting Billionaires and Destroying the Middle Class

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“The game is rigged,” writes Senator Elizabeth Warren in her new book A Fighting Chance . It’s rigged because the rich and their lobbyists have rigged the rules of the game to their favor. The rules are reflected in a tax code and bankruptcy laws that have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history.The result?

America has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among the world’s most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, road and rail are falling apart, and our middle class is being guttered out thanks to three decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95 percent of all economic gains.A rigged tax code and a bloated military budget are starving the federal and state governments of the revenue it needs to invest in infrastructure, which means today America looks increasingly like a Third World nation, and now new data shows America’s intellectual resources are also in decline.

For the past three decades, the Republican Party has waged a dangerous assault on the very idea of public education. Tax cuts for the rich have been balanced with spending cuts to education. During the New Deal era of the 1940s to 1970s, public schools were the great leveler of America. They were our great achievement. It was universal education for all, but today it’s education for those fortunate enough to be born into wealthy families or live in wealthy school districts. The right’s strategy of defunding public education leaves parents with the option of sending their kids to a for-profit school or a theological school that teaches kids our ancestors kept dinosaurs as pets.

“What kind of future society the defectors from the public school rolls envision I cannot say. However, having spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo—a war-torn hellhole with one of those much coveted limited central governments, and, not coincidentally, a country in which fewer than half the school-age population goes to public school—I can say with certainty that I don’t want to live there,” writes Chuck Thompson in Better off Without Em.

Comparisons with the Democratic Republic of Congo are not that far-fetched given the results of a recent report by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is the first comprehensive survey of the skills adults need to work in today’s world, in literacy, numeracy and technology proficiency. The results are terrifying. According to the report, 36 million American adults have low skills.

It gets worse. In two of the three categories tested, numeracy and technological proficiency, young Americans who are on the cusp of entering the workforce—ages 16 to 24—rank dead last, and is third from the bottom in numeracy for 16- to 65-year-olds.

The United States has a wide gap between its best performers and its worst performers. And it had the widest gap in scores between people with rich, educated parents and poor, undereducated parents, which is exactly what Third World countries look like, i.e. a highly educated super class at the top and a highly undereducated underclass at the bottom, with very little in the middle.

The report shows a relationship between inequalities in skills and inequality in income. “How literacy skills are distributed across a population also has significant implications on how economic and social outcomes are distributed within the society. If large proportions of adults have low reading and numeracy skills, introducing and disseminating productivity-improving technologies and work-organization practices can be hampered; that, in turn, will stall improvements in living standards,” write the authors of the report.

There is a defined correlation between literacy, numeracy and technology skills with jobs, rising wages and productivity, good health, and even civic participation and political engagement. Inequality of skills is closely correlated to inequality of income. In short, our education system is not meeting the demands of the new global environment, and the outlook is grim, given the Right’s solution is to further defund public education while ushering kids into private schools and Christian academies aka “segregation academies.”  The Republican-controlled South is where you see the Right’s education strategy in action. “Inspired by home-school superstars such as Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, tens of thousands of other southern families have fled their public-school systems in order to soak their children in the anti-intellectual sitz bath of religious denial.” In other words, we’re dumb and getting dumber.

While charter schools aren’t unique to the South, conservative states tend to respond most enthusiastically to their message, which makes Republican-controlled states ground zero for the further degradation of public education. The U.S. will likely continue to poll like countries like Indonesia and Tanzania, rather than Japan and Sweden when it comes to meeting the demands of a global economy.

Despite their hype and profits, study after study show that kids in charter schools perform no better on achievement tests than kids in public schools. But the correlation between a strong public education system and social mobility is demonstrated clearly in the OECD report. A 2006 report by Michael A. McDaniel of Virginia Commonwealth University showed that states with higher estimated collective IQ have greater gross state product, citizens with better health, more effective state governments, and less violent crime. In other words, were we to invest more in public education, we’d be instantly more intelligent, healthy, safe, and financially sound.

“The principal force for convergence [of wealth] — the diffusion of knowledge — is only partly natural and spontaneous. It also depends in large part on educational policies,” writes Thomas Piketty in his 700-page bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century . In other words, if we really want to reduce inequality, and if we really want to be a global leader in the 21st century, we need to invest more into our education system, which requires the federal government to ensure the rich and the mega-corporations pay their share. But we need to act now.

SOURCE:  AlterNet

Polo Ralph Lauren Clothing Line to be Made in Rochester

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Before a throng of cheering Hickey Freeman Co.employees, company officials and Sen. Charles Schumer Monday announced a $1 million manufacturing deal with Polo Ralph Lauren and declared that there are more such deals to come.
“We’re no longer interested in survival,” said Stephen Granovsky, CEO of Toronto-based Grano Retail Holdings, which bought the famed Rochester clothing company last year. “Now we’re interested in growth.”Schumer said, “We were looking for quite some time for the right parent (for Hickey Freeman). Now we’ve found it. We’ve come home, in a sense.”

Under the contract with Polo Ralph Lauren, Hickey Freeman will manufacture the company’s “Blue Label” line of tailored suits and sport jackets. The work — which could lead to more Polo contracts for Hickey, Granovsky said — is expected to begin next month.

The deal will increase Hickey’s revenue by at least 10 percent, Schumer said.

Granovsky said the deal was worth about $1 million. He said there will be at least two other such contracts with major clothing labels in the coming weeks.

“There is stability now at Hickey Freeman,” Granovsky said.

Schumer said, “To be able to bring together two dynamic, trailblazing American clothing brands is a huge step forward for Hickey Freeman.”

Officials declined to provide details about the pending contracts, but said the additional work will help Hickey achieve its goal of full factory employment by 2015. The workforce now numbers 415.

Schumer said Hickey’s fortunes improved when Grano bought it in part because Grano also owns the Canadian high-end men’s clothier, Samuelsohn, and understands the importance of quality tailoring over quick returns on investments.

The new deal, and the stability Schumer and Granovsky cited, is in contrast to Hickey’s tumultuous business life over the past several years.

After longtime owner Hartmarx Corp. filed for bankruptcy in 2009, the British private equity firm Emerisque Brands and SKNL, an Indian clothing manufacturer, bought Hartmarx’s assets. Then the holding company they formed, HMX Acquisition Corp., itself filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Months later, Authentic Brands Group LLC bought Hickey Freeman and turned running Hickey Freeman and sister clothier Hart Schaffner Marx over to W Diamond Group Corp., a private company created by HMX CEO Doug Williams and his wife.

W Diamond Group then sold the Hickey to Grano.

Granovsky said his company is committed to Rochester. “Hickey Freeman isn’t going anywhere,” he said.

The move to Hickey is part of Polo Ralph Lauren’s “Made in America” initiative whereby some of its production will be brought back to the United States, Schumer and Grano company officials said Monday.

The Blue Label brand has been manufactured in Italy. The deal and others to come could boost production and add up to 50 jobs in the next three years.

No one from Ralph Lauren attended Monday’s news conference at the factory on North Clinton Avenue in Rochester.

Granovsky said Lauren is bringing the jobs back from Italy because of the preference American shoppers have shown for products made in this country.

“When Ralph Lauren made the uniforms for the U.S. Olympic team, he became aware of the importance of American-made,” Granovsky said.

Lauren designed and made the uniforms and other clothing for the U.S. Winter Olympics team that competed this year in Sochi, Russia.

Photo Stencil Adds Manufacturing Plant in Golden, Colorado

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Photo Stencil, LLC, a leading full-service provider of high-performance stencils and tooling, announces the addition of a manufacturing plant in Golden, CO. The new 35,200 sq. ft. facility has three cleanrooms: a 10,000 sq. ft. Class 10,000 cleanroom, a 4500 sq. ft. Class 1,000 cleanroom, and a small Class 100 cleanroom. The plant will be used to manufacture the electroform and more complex stencils that are needed for the small components and shrinking spaces found in advanced semiconductor packaging and challenging SMT applications. Laser and chemetch step stencils, blades, and screens will continue to be manufactured in the Colorado Springs, CO facility.
“We are very excited to have Photo Stencil expanding into our county. We look forward to having another global technology leader in our community,” said Jefferson County Commissioner Don Rosier.“This makes us the cleanest stencil manufacturer anywhere,” said Rachel Miller-Short, global VP of sales, Photo Stencil. “The continued move to shrinking components — reaching 30 microns and below — and package-on-package applications challenge the solutions side of our business.

“This makes us the cleanest stencil manufacturer anywhere”
Applications like these require a fully clean environment coupled with the latest technologies, manufacturing capabilities, and engineering teams. Photo Stencil focuses on these requirements and on meeting the needs of our customers today and beyond. This new facility will ensure our abilities to continue doing so, successfully.”
Full-scale manufacturing is expected to begin Q1 2015.About Photo Stencil
Photo Stencil, LLC provides high-performance stencils, squeegee blades, thick film and metal mask screens, and tooling for the surface mount technology (SMT) assembly, solar, and semiconductor industries. Its innovations include the patented AMTX E-FAB® electroformed stencils, high-performance, proprietary NicAlloy™, NicAlloy-XT™, laser-cut, and chemetch stencils, and patented electroformed E-Blade® squeegee blade. Stencil design support and customer-specific design libraries are also provided. Founded in 1979, Photo Stencil is headquartered in Colorado Springs and has a manufacturing facility in Mexico. For more information follow us on www.Linkedin.com/company/Photo-Stencil-llc, visit www.photostencil.com, or email info@photostencil.com.

ContactsPhoto Stencil, LLC
Rachel Miller-Short, +1 719-304-4224
rshort@photostencil.com

SOURCE:  BusinessWire

Pentagon Sneaker Policy Could Give New Balance a Boost

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BOSTON – Massachusetts-based New Balance could get a boost worth tens of millions of dollars with a new Pentagon policy providing military recruits with U.S.-made sneakers.
New Balance is one of the few shoe manufacturers that meet all federal requirements, said Matt LeBretton, spokesman for the company that manufactures shoes in Lawrence, Boston and Maine.

Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox announced Friday that the Department of Defense will provide military recruits with American-made footwear, rather than giving stipends to buy shoes.

U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas, a Lowell Democrat, has estimated that the military had spent about $180 million on cash allowances for recruits to buy sneakers since 2002.

U.S. shoe makers and lawmakers from Maine, Massachusetts and Michigan lobbied for the change to preserve some of the country’s few remaining shoe plants. In 2012, Rep. Mike Michaud of Maine provided a pair of monogrammed New Balance sneakers to the president, urging him to require the Defense Department to follow a law requiring military personnel to wear U.S.-made clothing from head to toe.

SOURCE:  CBS NEWS

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