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Here's a three-question quiz on all that is made in San Diego:
- What is the total value of San Diego County manufacturing production?
- How many people are employed in local manufacturing?
- Where is the capital of San Diego manufacturing?
The answers are quantified continually by the Economic Research Bureau of the Greater San Diego Chamber. It is a massive mother lode of information for the local manufacturer to mine. It also takes a while to compile. Although we are approaching the halfway point of 1999, it is 1997 that the Chamber has last charted for its annual look at San Diego manufacturing. So in 1997 terms, the answers to our quiz are: $20.5 billion; 122,100 employees; and Sorrento Valley.
Sorrento Valley — or as it is known in statistical compilation, ZIP Code 92121 — is far and away the center of San Diego manufacturing, with 335 enterprises so engaged in 1997. By comparison, the No. 2 San Diego County ZIP Code for number of manufacturers was 92069 — San Marcos — with 223 manufacturing establishments. The discrepancy is even greater when looking at the number of manufacturing employees: there were 17,600 in Sorrento Valley, 5,800 in San Marcos.
There is no shipbuilding, of course, in Sorrento Valley. Or much apparel-making. But plenty of electronic, instrument, and computer and office equipment (this last category still going by the Rust Age designation of "Industrial Machinery"). These three types of durable goods also have provided wages well above the weekly average for local manufacturing employees: $590, $599, and $700, respectively. Shipbuilders and their transportation-allied labor brethren averaged $635 weekly; apparel workers, $313, in a year when average local manufacturing weekly earnings were $533.
Chamber research analyst Darrell Beutel says notable among the reasons for the low wages of apparel workers is that many of them are part-time and the competition is global. "The apparel shops can’t really spend a lot or else they'd be priced out of the market," he observes.
The global economy is more than a competitive challenge to other local manufacturers; it is a source of raw materials and unfinished goods and a destination for their own products, whether finished or not. The Chamber's research bureau charts not only companies that assemble finished goods here but those whose goods will be finished elsewhere: "If they're adding value to the component and passing it on or selling it," Beutel notes.
This international trade growth has led to new research by the bureau. In 1997, it says, nearly 40 percent of San Diego manufacturers surveyed indicated buying and using foreign-made components in their production, and 55 percent exported and sold to other countries.
"We knew they were doing it. We just needed to find out how many of them were doing it," explains Beutel. The Chamber also learned that 30 percent of that 55 percent also were importing foreign-made components that were then assembled into the products they were exporting.
Leading the way among the exports have been electronics — products like televisions, circuit boards and computer components — most often to Mexico for further assembly. Electronics also have led the way in total san Diego manufacturing as well, with $3.4 billion in total value, slightly ahead of instruments at $3.2 billion and industrial machinery at $2.8 billion.
With $20.5 billion in 1997, manufacturing exceeded the previous year by 11 percent, the fourth straight year of good growth following what had been three consecutive years of decline. Another factor presenting a pleasant manufacturing position in San Diego has been an actual decrease in producer prices, attributed by the bureau in part to the use of foreign-made components.
For 1997, all that increased production meant that manufacturing equaled a quarter (24.6 percent) of the gross regional product. Yet manufacturing employment amounts to only 11.5 percent of the total San Diego payroll. That's great productivity. Better than the year before, and so on. But how does that stack up to a generation ago?
In 1969, there were 70,000 manufacturing workers in San Diego, or 19 percent of wage and salary employees, Beutel reports. But in that year when electronics and computers comprised such a far lesser part of the picture, manufacturing amounted to 30 percent of San Diego’s gross regional product, largely because of cold war-related defense spending.
So what do those percentages mean in comparison? That San Diego still has a way to go to catch up to what the region is capable of manufacturing? That the labor force has never been better?
"It’s a good sign because it means we’re more productive than before," Beutel answers. "It means San Diego companies have taken on the high-tech processes of manufacturing, and they've gone from being labor-intensive to capital-intensive. Now we’ve moved to a service-style economy."
The Chamber's next report on San Diego manufacturing is scheduled to be released in October.
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