[ggm]

Outsourcing is lame, and unwinding outsourcing can cost you money to settle issues with other companies which depend on that outsource agent and have regulatory and competition concerns you have to respect.

Paying Airbus to take their bit of this, is .. well it's strange but then I guess not.

Boeing being Boeing, somebody got a massive KPI for making this outsource happen, then somebody else will get a massive KPI for unwinding it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Outsourcing is lame, and unwinding outsourcing can cost you money

Apple (TSMC, Samsung), ARM (all fab), Microsoft (hardware) and NVIDIA (TSMC) each outsource critical parts of their value chains. The opposite of over-outsourcing is NBH syndrome.

[MrBuddyCasino]

TSMC‘s machines can build any kind of chip, once the masks are there, they have many customers and operate in highly competitive market where you can’t afford to fuck up and you can switch to a competitor more easily.

Spirit cannot easily build any airplane part, and it has very few customers and with very low levels of competition, so they can afford to be bad at their job because it is hard to switch suppliers.

The cases aren’t comparable.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Spirit cannot easily build any airplane part, and it has very few customers and with very low levels of competition

The first two factors should increase Boeing’s leverage.

> cases aren’t comparable

Of course they are. They’re all examples of outsourcing. The conclusion is outsourcing isn’t bad per se.

[MrBuddyCasino]

> The first two factors should increase Boeing’s leverage.

No because there isn’t another supplier you can easily switch to. You can see this in the outrageous prices they are able to charge Boeing for parts. With chip fabs you can observe their performance in the marketplace and determine which one is good and which is bad. It makes sense to outsource to them because the know-how and capital requirements have grown beyond to what a single chip designer can reasonably do in-house. Even Intel tries to onboard outside customers to its fabs.

Why would you outsource building a plane wing? They are not standardized but different for each plane, they are huge so you can’t exactly build retoolable conveyer belt production lines and amortize this investment over many models.

The only reason to do this is to safe on labor costs and because you don’t want the hassle of doing it yourself, at which point you have become an OEM that just plugs things together. It is primitive MBA thinking that is ignoring 2nd order effects.

[JumpCrisscross]

> No because there isn’t another supplier you can easily switch to

You listed three factors. The first two, ceteris paribus, increase buyer bargaining power; the last does not. That doesn’t change because in this situation the last overpowered the first two.

By analogy, shape, size and camber contribute to a wing’s stall speed. If a wing has the wrong camber, that doesn’t negate that all three are components. (And that wing, in turn, doesn’t disprove flight.)

> Why would you outsource building a plane wing? They are not standardized but different for each plane

This is true for a lot of specialised manufacturing, e.g. TSMC and Foxconn. Varied lines is not an argument against specialisation.

> they are huge so you can’t exactly build retoolable conveyer belt production line

The first moveable assembly line built ships at the Venetian Arsenale. Size is not an argument against specialisation.

> only reason to do this is to safe on labor costs and because you don’t want the hassle of doing it yourself

Not true for Spirit. In that case, it was labor complexity and capital costs.

> primitive MBA thinking

Shanahan, Spirit’s CEO, was an engineer before MBA.

[ggm]

Yes, but Apple has a habit of also shafting its outsources, like what they did to the UK designers back in the ipod era: as soon as chip design could make them more money they disintermediated. And now deal direct with the foundry.

ARM holdings annoys me. I wish they hadn't stopped doing fab. The potential weakness for the West dependency on TSMC worries me.

[JumpCrisscross]

> potential weakness for the West dependency on TSMC worries me

TSMC, in turn, outsources the entire front end of its value chain to its customers.

There is nothing wrong with outsourcing. Boeing is just bad at supply chain management.

[creato]

I think all your other examples are healthier because each step has multiple customers. The Boeing/Spirit arrangement looks more like an accounting gimmick than actual outsourcing.

[dotancohen]

These factories in question build for three major Western manufacturers: Boeing, Airbus, and Bombardier.

[creato]

How much though? Somewhere else in this thread someone said 67% of their revenue is from Boeing.

[Brybry]

Did you confuse ARM Holdings with AMD/GlobalFoundries?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Did you confuse ARM Holdings with AMD/GlobalFoundries?

No. ARM is fabless. That was an outsourcing innovation not too long ago.

[Brybry]

What I was replying to said:

> ARM holdings annoys me. I wish they hadn't stopped doing fab.

~~I thought ARM was always fabless?~~ Edit: I guess I'm somewhat mistaken after reading up on VLSI Technology.

[ggm]

ARM were in a jv with apple and a us vlsi fab company. They decided royalties were a better bet longterm.

[constantcrying]

>Outsourcing is lame

You can not make a modern airplane without significant outsourcing.

[rob74]

There is outsourcing of e.g. the engines, various hydraulic/electrical systems, electronics etc. etc. and then there is outsourcing bits of the fuselage, which is maybe not such a good idea. I mean, I understand how this came about - e.g. Spirit's location in Wichita was originally an independent airplane manufacturer (Stearman Aircraft, which was bought by United Aircraft and Transport Corp. and then became part of Boeing after UATC was broken up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems#History). Airbus is also made up of bits and pieces of various (former) European aircraft makers, so they also have assembly plants spread all over the continent, but these parts actually got more tightly integrated over the years, while Boeing took the opposite path.

[dotancohen]

SpaceX famously has almost no outsourcing. And Ford built his empire on vertical integration, all the way down to the mining the ore.

Neither are airplane manufacturers, but they represent companies on either side of the complex machine spectrum compared to airplanes.

[netsharc]

Ford was last century though, can you do that in this century?

I wonder how far "no outsourcing" goes. Do they make their own nuts and bolts? Even if they do, the metal must've come from a supplier (unless they also have mines). Do they make their own screens, and chips, for the flight controls? Not being cynical/sarcastic, just curious.

[dotancohen]

Nuts and bolts are considered COTS items: Commodity Off The Shelf. They are not particular to e.g. the Falcon 9 or Starship. The word Commodity is important here - changing suppliers is relatively simple and there are standards that can be adhered to (but need to be checked, remember CSR-7).

Things like screens and chips are less of a commodity than are aerospace-grade bolts, but if I'm not mistaken many of these components are shared with another Musk company that designs and manufactures automobiles - so they have commodity of scale and a long track record, plus many realworld users to uncover bugs. It might not be the exact same component, but much is shared. One prominent example that was stated explicitly recently was the actuator motors for the Starship flaps - right out of a Tesla.