Follow the link - an interactive map of existing manufacturing enterprises in the United States, which shows production centers on the continental part of the country, as well as enterprises in Alaska and Hawaii. US manufacturing is concentrated in several well-developed corridors, particularly in four major regions:
1. Northeast Corridor: Defense and Biopharmaceuticals.
2. Great Lakes: Automotive, steel, and now battery manufacturing.
3. Los Angeles Basin: Aerospace, Defense and Electronics.
4. Texas triangle: energy, semiconductor production and heavy industry.
In China there are about 150-250 thousand independent CNC workshops/“job shops”.
With 200 thousand CNC workshops in China, 24 thousand in the USA and 3-5 thousand (and actually less) in the Russian Federation, ours is 2-3 times lower the density of CNC manufacturers per million inhabitants than in the USA, and 5-7 times lower than in China.
For the economy, this means less elasticity of supply chains: longer lead times, more expensive small series and prototypes, higher dependence on single contractors and import bottlenecks - therefore, slower product introduction to the market, higher final price parts/lots and product costs, weaker export competitiveness in complex industries.
In the defense industry and critical infrastructure this is a direct risk of maintainability, readiness, rapid creation of new products (few “short arms” for rare positions), and for SMEs it is a barrier to scaling, implementation and development of digital tools production.
In other words, the “thin” layer of CNC job shops is a bottleneck that slows down the innovative speed of the economy: until Russia has at least 10–15 thousand living and active digital workshops managed by entrepreneurs, with a modern machine park, teams and equipment for reverse engineering, quality control, rapid prototyping, we will systematically lose in terms of timing, cost and product variability.
