The Chinese ship plenty of glass to NA. The weight is of no consequence since freight is charged per volume (40' container, 20' container). Typically a 40 ft container from China to NY State is about $3600-$4200 depending on the Logistics Company and time of year. Many of the Condo's in Toronto, Canada (condo capital of the world) are faced with Chinese glass. Glass is typically compromised when it is not packed or stored correctly. It is actually quite durable and is shipped from all over the world. A good example is the glass Apple used for its new campus, it came from Germany.

I think the problem here is "Just in Time" delivery to the Auto Manufacturers. It takes about 12 days on the water and another 5 on rail to reach the rust belt or east coast. So that is probably why they decided to start producing in the USA so they can meet tighter production and delivery schedules and take shipping lines/ports out of the equation.

From back when I was working in that industry, I was told we couldn't really compete on price with China. They were trying to get glass from China because it was cheaper than what we could make in our own float plants. We were trying to compete on quality, that is to say, delivering less broken or damaged glass.

That said, you're right--I don't remember too much trouble shipping raw glass. It was just coated in Lucite and the first sheet is always a write-off. We had more trouble when people had packs fall when trying to load them into the gantry every so often, though broken sheets were quite a pain to deal with sometimes more from a safety perspective, when the crane can't get suction on it to drop it and it's too big to safely handle.

You're right, the article didn't mention difficulties shipping glass. It did mention that they wanted to be close to their customers though. I'm not really sure that your detail would have added anything as the article wasn't really about glass manufacturing. It could have been added with one or two sentences though.

In context to the article, my point is that Fuyao is a poor example.

The author makes it seem like Fuyao's decision to build in Ohio is part of a larger trend across verticals, when in reality the nature of the glass industry demands Fuyao building local to suppliers.

They setup the factory in US because of the heavy taxes back in China. The chairman mentioned in the article gave a detailed talk touching this subject at the end of 2016 and he claimed that it is cheaper to operate in US once taxes are all factored in.

Yes, it still does get shipped a lot of places though.

For example,"float glass" is not manufactured in New Zealand - no windows have been made there for 25 years, every single one is imported.

It seems that at the scale these plants operate, it's not economic to run one for a country of 4.5 million people (with a first world minimum wage) without tariffs or subsidies.