[polskibus]

It's about having your supply chain as close to your customer as possible so you can pull (as in lean) on demand. What then happens is the customers' needs iterate faster and faster and you need to keep up. Fit the 3d printer in the shop, print whatever the consumer needs in less then it takes to drink a cup of coffee and you're the winner. Of course you need to make sure you have enough raw materials. That's something China has to import a lot. So unless China builds up domestic demand to much higher levels, western countries will gain more from 3d printing than China.

[2stop]

It isn't just 'print whatever the consumer needs'. It's

- Dig it out of the ground

- process it

- Fabricate the unprintable bits

- Store all of this

- Print whatever the consumer needs in less time than it takes to drink a coffee.

So unless this make believe "shop" is fronted onto a processing/fabrication plant, which is itself, fronted on a magical mine that you can dig up any resource you like. Your scenario can never happen.*

* Or we could invent teleportation.

[mitochondrion]

Yes, but no.

Yes, there's a ton of raw resource extraction, processing, and transport.

But no, because a Nissan Altima or Apple Macbook (or Moto X!) are not commodities in the same way that gold or lumber or silicon are.

There's a reason that the Nissan Altima was the sixth best-selling car last year. I don't purport to know what that reason is, but it's not because it's comprised of raw materials any different from any other car.