No matter what market you're looking to enter, your electronics design needs to be rock-solid if it's going to succeed.  The electronics manufacturing field is booming and still barely meeting demand, so there's plenty of room for great products to succeed.  

But they have to be great products.

Companies still using "fire and forget" style outsourced electronic manufacturing services, which simply build to order, are taking big gambles with their product.  Electronics today need to be more thoroughly tested, better-built, and better targeted to consumers if they're going to succeed.  

Electronics companies in the 90s and 2000s which chose to outsource their production work overseas often found themselves making compromises.  The great distances and language barriers involved often introduced new issues that had to be worked around, often to the detriment of the product, the customers, or both.

One of the most obvious of these -and the most costly- is what happened to post-sale support in the wake of the offshoring boom.   A big change was made to how a lot of companies handled warranty claims: Rather than attempting to repair the item, they simply sent out a new one every time.

Granted, there are cases where this can be cost-effective, but when talking about products that can be hundreds of dollars on the shelf, it's incredibly wasteful to send out new ones when often a single low-cost component is to blame.  

If you haven't recently looked into the advantages of American-based electronics manufacturing, it might be time to do so.  US manufacturers have been hard at work improving their service offerings, to compete in a global market against cut-rate manufacturing options.

America is already a highly-competitive option for electronics manufacturing, and when you partner with domestic firms, you can get services far beyond what most overseas partners can provide.

Of these, the inclusion of PCB repair services and other post-sale support is perhaps the most crucial, as it addresses a huge ongoing cost in electronics that's rarely factored into the initial manufacturing decisions.  Rather than treating post-sale as an afterthought, American electronics firms can bring you a fully-integrated all-in-one solution for introducing new products to market.

 Likely because of the offshoring boom of the 90s and 2000s, there persists a belief that American-based manufacturing is too expensive to be worth considering - but nothing could be further from the truth. According to multiple studies into the matter, in the long term, costs associated with manufacturing in China and manufacturing in the USA are effectively at parity.

Moreover, American manufacturers have been hard at work updating their processes and competing on value rather than sheer cost.  Sure, the up-front costs of a cut-rate overseas manufacturer will be lower than domestic... but that domestic manufacturer can offer plenty of services and long-term value that few, if any, overseas centers could hope to compete with.

A company that means to make a name for itself in electronics, whether consumer or industrial, is under more pressure to perform today than ever before.  The rise of the Internet and social networking has exponentially decreased the amount of time it takes for a poorly-designed product to become known as a lemon.

Previously, a company had weeks or even months before enough poor reviews accumulated to damage their reputation.  Today, it's a matter of days or hours.  If someone buys a poor product, one of the first things they do is tell the world about it, literally.

Manufacturing based on Surface-Mounted Technology has taken over electrical engineering, and for good reason.  Rather than using space-hungry holes through the board, SMT-based circuits have components which are placed directly onto the board, using a solder paste which also works as a glue.

The hard part is the baking that follows.  While there are several possible techniques, the board has to be precisely raised to temperatures in excess of 200 degrees, to properly melt the solder.  Much like when cooking dinner, too little or too much heat can quickly ruin the project.

Modern manufacturers utilizing surface mounted technology use all-in-one devices called Reflow Soldering Ovens to ensure proper circuit boards.  These marvels of engineering can automatically handle the heating and cooling of each circuit board, sending it through a series of internal chambers for treatment.

Overall trends in US assembly manufacturing point to America continuing to be a strong player in the global electronics manufacturing industry.  

The latest numbers on industry trends at first look a bit bad for domestic electronics assembly.  After nearly uninterrupted growth for most of last year, there was a slight dip in reported shipments for Q1 2015.  Numbers are still higher than they were this time last year, however.  It's also not hard to chalk the decline down to simply being in the post-Christmas season.  Just picking one representative industry, it's clear that smartphone sales take a big dip in Q1 pretty much every year.