" Thomas Mayor, a senior adviser with Booz & Company who specializes in manufacturing strategy, says that in industry after industry, he is seeing the same kind of reassessment GE has made. When asked about the value of the original rush offshore, Mayor laughs.
"Twelve years ago, I saw a lot of boards of directors and senior executives saying, 'Three years from now, I'm going to be sourcing $4 billion in product from China. Go figure out how to make it happen.' " Part of the rationale, from the start, was merely to gain a foothold in the Chinese market. And for many companies, that made sense, at least to some extent. "But if you press them on their savings by sourcing from China for North America, I get stories like 'Oh, I asked about that six months ago. I had five finance guys working on it, and they couldn't come up with any savings.' At the end of the day, they say, 'If we were doing this for the U.S. market, we should never have gone to China in the first place.'?" "