There’s lots of talk about companies moving medical device manufacturing work overseas in the wake of the device tax next year. But executives at a Fort Wayne, Indiana-based medical device contract manufacturer say they’ve lately seen a trend in the opposite direction.
L.H. Medical manufactures surgical instruments and implants, and focuses its efforts on difficult parts and complex assemblies. It’s a fairly young company that launched under the L.H. Industries umbrella about five years ago, but it already employs 70 workers and is growing, said President and CEO Bruce Emerick.
Some of the OEMs that make up the company’s customer base have been learning the hard way that sometimes the cheaper labor they can get overseas isn’t always worth the savings, said Scott Nine, director of operations for L.H. Many tools today are over-engineered or designed by people who have never seen the setting in which they’re going to be used, so OEMs are seeing the need for face-to-face communication with manufacturers on improving the design of their products.
That, combined with escalating wages in Asia and more advanced machine tools that reduce the labor needed in manufacturing, has been enough to bring some customers back to the U.S., Emerick explained.
