@AkinSawyerr wrote:
Question is should Africans bother producing hardware on the continent or focus on software and services?
My question was inpired by a pretty interesting medium post that gives one a vew to just how Shenzhen has commoditized hardware production. The full article can be read here.
Here are a couple of excerpts that give one the gist of what the full article covers:
What $50 Buys You at Huaqiangbei, the World’s Most Fascinating Electronic Market.
We’ve long been fascinated by the Huaqiangbei electronics market area of Shenzhen. (Hereafter, we’ll just call it HQB.) If you need some bit of electronics or a phone accessory, you can find it in HQB. There is an entire multi-floor shopping mall that sells nothing but phone cases. There’s one that specializes in smartwatches. There’s a mall that sells cellphones wholesale. There’s one just for surveillance cameras. And then there are the component markets. Need a chip? Or 250,000 chips? Somebody there can get them for you.
Every box-of-crap recipient got $31.76 worth of stuff at Shenzhen prices. If they’d bought everything on Amazon, they would have paid over $130.36. (We couldn’t find the fake SD card, flippable cable or stickers on Amazon.) Those Amazon prices aren’t always the cheapest option, but represent at least a little bit of bargain hunting. That maps pretty closely to how hard we fought for deals in HQB.
Because of the shipping issue, we lost $10.22 per box. Over all, though, the experiment was a success.
We got to learn a little bit about “volume” purchasing in Shenzhen, found out some interesting details about things we’d seen in the markets before and learned about some of the headaches of shipping packages from China to the US. (There’s a reason we’re paying professionals to help us ship the Model 01.)What are you thoughts? What insights do you find interesting from the article?
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