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>For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope.

Automation certainly helps, but there are quirks and hiccups you could run into. Let's say you built a factory every 5 years. Along the way some machinery vendor goes out of business. You might or might not have the machine design, the rights to make another version, etc.

As you build out, you figure out things that work well or don't work well, and you make adjustments to your process accordingly. Building every factory identically or at the same time is probably a bad choice unless everything is really well fleshed out. The marginal benefits of upgrading older factories to the new standard is rarely economically viable.

>For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?

The actions I've seen (not limited to former employers) include CEO's meeting with high level federal government officials, getting local property tax exemptions for expansions bringing jobs, and collaborative industry group action about unfair dumping of product on the US market.

Remember each manufacturer in an industry group has a different structure. Some things are good for the industry as a whole, and some are more beneficial for one manufacturer than another. CEO's advocate for their own company too, not limiting public actions to trade group actions.

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Previously I hadn't covered capital expenditure. Building factories is super expensive and tooling factories is also super expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if the facility and tooling would run 100M-500M.

Even in manual assembly, you'd have jigs and tools to buy, go/no-go guages, etc.



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