In the latest episode of the Bring it Home podcast, Brian McMorris, founder and president of Futura Automation, said he sees robotics and investments in automation playing a role in reshoring decisions.
Bring It Home celebrates the North American manufacturing renaissance, reindustrialization and reshoring taking place across the continent. Its co-hosts are Craig Fuller, founder and CEO of Firecrown Media, and JP Hampstead, strategic analyst at Firecrown.
Meet McMorris
McMorris, whose company offers automation solutions to manufacturers and helps them with the economics of bringing their operations back to the U.S., has been in the automation industry since 1980. He said he wanted to work in robotics since childhood.
“I grew up with the Jetsons,” McMorris said. “I had that in my mind, but there really wasn’t much in the way of robotics back in the early ’80s. But by the ’90s they became more prevalent, and I joined companies at that time – a couple of different companies – that were focused on the robot industry.”
By 2015, McMorris had become vice president of Adept Robotics – one of the last American manufacturers of robots – until it was acquired by Omron Robotics later that year and his position was eliminated in 2016.
In 2017, McMorris started his own company, Futura Automation, with the goal of helping U.S. companies reshore.
“I always believed in that all the way back into the ’80s when [Japanese manufacturing] first kind of went after the robot industry and the car industry, especially,” he said. “But then, of course, China came along in the 1990s and 2000s. I saw manufacturing disappear before my eyes. I saw cities vaporized by the loss of their main industry, so I was very interested and motivated to help companies get back the manufacturing they had lost.”
Manufacturing and national security
McMorris said that when President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he rallied support around the issue of unfair Chinese trade practices.
“A tariff-free world works great when everybody plays fairly and by the same rules,” McMorris said. “It doesn’t work at all when some countries cheat and charge tariffs against your [products], or they might call it a value-added tax … . It makes an unfair playing ground, which already is unfair enough because of the differentials in labor costs.”
He said the U.S. over the past several years has shown growing interest in retrieving manufacturing that’s been lost to foreign powers the past several decades.
“It’s become a matter of national security, to be honest, in many different ways,” McMorris said. “Not just [in] defense, but also pharmaceuticals, food, automotive and [other sectors], we can’t lose all of our manufacturing or we have nothing.”
Bringing operations back to the US
McMorris said companies are bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. He said increasing labor costs in China and growing tensions between China and the U.S. are key motivators.
“I think most people in management want to be good citizens,” McMorris said. “They want to do the right thing by their country [and] they don’t want to be the downfall of American hegemony.”
That said, there are “bumps in the road” when it comes to U.S. reshoring efforts, including changes in government policy, changing interest rates and recession fears.
“There’s been this general fear, I think, in the C-suite that we’re going to hit a big recession,” he said. “We haven’t, but because of the interest rates going up to 7% and inflation at 9%, there were thoughts that we were going to have a big recession. It hasn’t panned out, but that didn’t stop the C-suites from getting conservative about it.”
McMorris said he would advise manufacturers interested in successfully reshoring operations back to the U.S. to study what others in their sector are doing first.
“Automation is sort of a playing field leveler,” he said. “The differentials in labor and that sort of thing are less important when you have a robot, because robots cost the same thing everywhere. … It would be nice to see some robot manufacturing come back to the U.S. I don’t have any near-term expectation of that because there’s no companies here anymore, but that would be an important thing.”
He also said automation robots are built using rare earth minerals mostly controlled by China today.
“We need to start mining again, but in a way that is environmentally conscientious,” McMorris said.
Other headlines and topics discussed in this episode include:
- The market’s reaction to President-elect Donald Trump’s election win, Cabinet nominations and political appointees.
- Supply chain reindustrialization via an expected flurry of upcoming trade policy changes by the U.S. government.
- How national security relates to supply chain reindustrialization.
- An additional $1.5 billion investment by President Joe Biden’s administration into passenger rail for 19 infrastructure projects in the northeast U.S.
- Apple’s iPhone partners making plans for U.S. manufacturing.
- AstraZeneca investing $3.5 billion in research and development and manufacturing facilities in the U.S.
The Bring It Home podcast is currently on YouTube and will soon be available on other podcast platforms.
