Re: Which market segment will they go for?
Space can be anywhere. Out of date machinery is a liability.
When GM moved one of its factories from Detroit to Mexico, it laid off 11,000 people in Detroit and hired 1500 in mexico. If forced to move it back, it is likely to only hire 500 or so and most of them will be pushing paper, not maintaining the robots doing the actual work.
if you were a factory assembly line worker and you got laid off, you need to accept that those kinds of jobs aren't coming back - ever.
And once you have robots doing the actual work the driving factor for location is supply lines, energy cost and distribution logistics. That tends to put the best location near the customers.
Don't forget that the UK factory towns weren't built where they were because that's where people were - Manchester was a miserable wet fishing village with a perfect location for steam-engine powered cotton mills because that damp weather made dust explosions unlikely and it had good proximity to incoming raw materials as well as transport for finished product.
People moved there for the work, not the other way around, and as the UK government has found out several times to its cost, directing that factories be located in XYZ areas to soak up unemployment simply results in high numbers of inexperienced people working on lines, turning out buggy product - and without years of expensive training, the problems won't get resolved.
It may sound harsh but expecting the government to provide work or force employers to operate in areas of high unemployment simply because people have grown up and lived all their lives in that area is a non-starter. It's been tried and failed too many times under governments of all stripes - the money is better spent on educating and training to ensure that laid off factory workers (etc) can be employable in other fields, or paid to move where work is available.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
