American Industry, Facts And Fiction

Pan American Airways Advertisment
Photo Source: Public Domain

The U.S. is no longer the manufacturing powerhouse that it once was. We are being told this everyday. We are told that we can not compete, because our overhead is far too high. Indeed we have seen many companies bite the dust, that used to be the foundation of this country. Steel companies have gone out of business, or shrunk in size. Some have diversified by buying companies in different fields. US Steel is one, they purchased Marathon Oil. They still produce steel, but only at the same level that they did in 1902 and yet they are the 10th biggest steel producer in the world. Pan American Airlines was thought to be indestructible and the backbone of the airline business. They were the most famous of all the air carriers and were featured in many movies, yet they died out.

Former RCA Building In The U.S.
Photo Source: Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 License.

The demise of our electronics companies are the most disturbing, since the names were also purchased and we see items on the shelves from Japan, China and Korea that bear these names, such as RCA, which was Radio Corporation of America, Emerson and Sylvania along with others. We are flooded with Japanese and Korean electronics, but amazingly the biggest seller of televisions in this country is neither Japan, China or Korea, it is America. Vizio, is an upstart company that started in 2002 with only 3 employees. It is based in Irvine, California. It does have foreign investors, but it is American. In August of 2007, it became the largest seller of LCD televisions in North America. In that year’s second quarter it sold well over 600,000 televisions. They now also make High Definition Surround Sound Systems, LCD computer monitors and HDTV accessories and are moving into other products. Who says an American company can not be competitive in electronics?

We did have another US company that was doing okay in the television production business for awhile, it was Olevia. It was founded in 2004 and had its headquarters in Tempe, Arizona. It began to lose market share after a burst of gains and in 2009 was sold to Emerson. This was sad indeed, as they had a nice product. The company was a result of a merger with Syntax and Brillian Corporations.

The auto industry in this country is really reeling. This is a problem that they have brought on themselves, by not paying enough attention to quality. Pundits say that we Americans can not compete with the production costs of cars made in foreign countries and yet, many foreign companies are moving their auto production plants here and still building quality cars and keeping down their costs. Ford has proven that we too can build a nice car at a competitive price. Ford has been grabbing an increasing amount of market share and its cars have been getting rave reviews. I haven’t been to a Ford dealer in many years, I can only hope that they have changed their attitude towards their customers and decided to treat them with the respect that the foreign companies do.

General Motors is also beginning to put out a much better product. It has slimmed down and gotten rid of some of its brands that were really duplicates of what they already had under a different badge. Oldsmobile and Buick were almost identical twins except for some changes in sheet metal and many of the Pontiac models were built on the same chassis as Chevrolet. Years ago executives from this company laughed at Toyota for painting parts of their cars that were not visible. Who is laughing now? Chrysler corporation is gasping its last dying breaths as it continues to sell less and less cars and if they begin to sell Fiats, as is rumored, I really don’t think that this will help them very much.

It is being said that the most successful companies on the Internet are American companies. I guess if you look at the giants such as Google, Yahoo, Computer Associates, Oracle, and Microsoft, just to mention a few, you can see that we have been very successful there. We seem to be very good in new areas of technology. Will this be true in the future, who knows, but we are building quite an infrastructure on the Internet now.

Boeing 377 Stratocruiser 1949
Photo Source: GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version
Photo by Chalmers Butterfield

Boeing is only one of two companies that are building commercial airplanes. It was founded in 1916, in Chicago. It is also the second largest aerospace and defense contractor in the world. Boeing’s competitor, Air Bus has met with some success and has challenged Boeing on many fronts. After some ups and downs, Air Bus went for size and Boeing went for fuel efficiency. Boeing has been holding its own in the competition and considering the state of the economy, has been doing well under the circumstances.

American industry is not dead and indeed it leads the world in some areas. If it can do this is some areas of the economy, it might very well bounce back in other areas. We all know that in some types of manufacturing the only difference is manufacturing costs which boil down to the amount of wages and benefits that the worker;s are paid. As the global economy eventually increases, wages go up and products from those areas become more expensive. As the dollar weakens here our products become less expensive. It just might turn out that we will meet in the middle somewhere and industry will again take off in this country. One way to make this happen is to keep up with the newest technology and put it to good use.