03/05/2025
Networked Robotics' products (with one exception) are designed and assembled in the United States. Almost every integrated circuit in any electronic product sold by any company, including ours, is produced in the pacific rim. The chips we use all are made in Thailand, Malaysia, China, and Taiwan even though they are often designed here by American companies.
In a post on Facebook many years ago we argued that this was an economic and security risk to the United States because these countries were all close to each other geographically. In 2022 the Biden administration signed the Chips Act to facilitate (partially fund) US-based semiconductor manufacturing. The current administration wants to kill this subsidy and instead use its own brand of semiconductor protectionism using tariffs. You can argue that broad across the board tariffs on semiconductor imports are more fair, because instead of giving taxpayer money to a couple of giant chip manufacturers here they allow chip manufacturers from any country to compete on a level import playing field.
What will cost Networked Robotics is if tariffs on chips become high without warning. And what will really cost us is if chips become completely unavailable (as they were in the Covid period) due to market instability from any cause.
