In Fremont, we talk about manufacturing — a lot. And lately, we are not the only ones. Whether it’s the buzz around the maker movement or the tremendous response to Tesla’s Model 3 launch last week, the ways in which manufacturing is impacting our economy, and our lives are becoming more and more apparent. But don’t just take my word for it — let the experts tell you.

At last week’s Silicon Valley Manufacturing Roundtable meeting, the Bay Area Economic Institute (BAEI) released its new report, “Reinventing Manufacturing.” The report is a sweeping analysis of California’s manufacturing landscape and provides some unique insight into why the State is on the leading edge of a major transformation in global manufacturing.

There are two fundamental reasons why this report is important: 1) BAEI now joins other prestigious think tanks that are working to move manufacturing higher up on public policy agendas and 2) it goes beyond reporting raw data, which can sometimes be misleading. Instead, it digs deeper and carefully interprets metrics like employment and wages to show that something very powerful is happening around advanced industries.

Sometimes a picture (or a chart) really is worth a thousand words. We’re highlighting a few from the report, but a glance at the full document is well worth it.

(All graphics from BAEI “Reinventing Manufacturing” report, with original source cited.)

IoT ripples through advanced industries.

 

Note the uptick in jobs overall since 2010. And in our top five sectors, including biomedical, we have been steadily adding jobs since 1990.

 

Between 1990 and 2014, average annual incomes in manufacturing increased at a faster rate than the economy as a whole, where incomes rose by 24 percent.

Industrial Land Use in California

The Bay Area’s inventory of manufacturing space is the largest in the state, based on the sum of the 3 sub-regions shown (North Bay, East Bay, South Bay).