I’ve considered leveraging this in electronic manufacturing. Send design off to be cheaply fabricated, wait for it to appear on aliexpress as a clone with all BOM cost optimisation done free. Buy bulk lots and resell in local country. Bingo!

I agree. Doing this now for 5G "mesh" based BTLE devices which I hope will drop dramatically in price. Working out low-cost PMIC, crystal and passive component compatibilities for US based chipsets is a bit of a regulatory issue, but the "clones" iterate so fast I expect them to have complete designs available by mid-2019 and hope to make the money on the software / data.

Interesting. I suppose your value add could be EMC, packaging, support and infrastructure on that.

That works even better if your product has no electronics at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18210950

Then hire another factory to clone that BOM optimized part for v2 :p

Just wait :)

If you look at the really cheap multimeters based on the DT830 design root they were originally derived from early Fluke DMMs circa 1985. Fluke hired Intersil to make the ASIC, Intersil second sourced it, the Chinese cloned it and cost optimised it, and then more Chinese guys cloned the target devices (panel meters and DMMs) and built mass production lines. Optimally they even optimised out the DIP packages as they were expensive and bonded the die straight to the PCB.

Down from $500 a pop to $2.

From my personal experience, they seed foreign factories with Military Hackers. It happen to us back in 2004 and we ended up closing the factory since it became a huge headache. They were constantly trying to get into our financials, HR and R&D network. It was comical when we would send a team to confront the employee. They would basically stand up and walk out without saying a word. There was nothing we could do. I still don't know how a company thinks it can remain secure having operations in China.

Samsung announced today that the Chinese stole their new bendable screen technology.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft...

I also expect the productive work output of a foreign spy to be pretty low.

Also I think people are focusing too much on the problem just being IN China. I guarantee you there’s at least one Chinese national working at Intel IN THE US that’s a spy. That goes for just about any large company.