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The team eliminated 1 out of every 5 parts. It cut the cost of the materials by 25 percent.

the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.

Time-to-market has also improved, greatly.

four weeks on the boat from China and one week dockside to clear customs.

Total time from factory to warehouse: 30 minutes.

there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”

At the end of the day, they say, ‘If we were doing this for the U.S. market, we should never have gone to China in the first place.’ ”

But the logic of onshoring today goes even further—and is driven, in part, by the newfound impatience of the product cycle itself.

Just a few years ago, the design of a new range or refrigerator was assumed to last seven years. Now, says Lou Lenzi, GE’s managers figure no model will be good for more than two or three years.

The country of 4.7 million people climbed seven spots to 102nd in the World Bank’s annual “Doing Business” report this year, lagging behind China, Vietnam and Namibia. Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook on Costa Rica to negative from neutral in September, citing a rising debt burden and widening budget deficit. Moody’s rates the country Baa3, putting it in the same category as Turkey and Iceland.

In a Bloomberg survey published last month, Costa Rica was ranked fourth behind Russia, Argentina and Ukraine on a list of countries confronting the biggest loss of investor confidence. The survey cited data including the rising cost of credit default swaps and the currency’s performance against the dollar.

California-based Intel, whose processors run more than 80 percent of personal computers shipped worldwide every year, originally chose to establish operations in Costa Rica after studying sites in Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, according to a 2000 case study by Harvard University’s Center for International Development. The company’s $600 million investment at the time represented about 4.2 percent of GDP, prompting the company’s then-Vice President Bob Perlman to say Intel’s arrival was like “putting a whale in a swimming pool,” according to the study.

n 2013, about 21 percent of Costa Rica’s exports of goods came from Intel, according to investment promotion agency CINDE

4,000 jobs

Today, the aluminum products have approximately a 40 percent  share in the total export of goods from Iceland (which is more or less the same proportion as that of fish products).

Because burning natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, this technology has helped the United States reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the lowest level since the mid-1990s