In 2021, the private and federal push for domestic supply of essential goods propelled reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI) job announcements to a record high, according to the Reshoring Initiative. Projections from the Reshoring Initiative’s first-half 2022 data show reshoring and FDI continuing these gains. The current 2022 projection of jobs announced is around 350,000, which is another record and up from 260,000 in 2021. If the projection is achieved, 2022 will bring the total jobs announced since 2010 to over 1.6 million.

Despite COVID-19, reshoring numbers were up in 2020. Reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI) job announcements for 2020 were 160,649, bringing the total jobs announced since 2010 to over 1 million (1,057,054). In addition, reshoring exceeded FDI by nearly 100%, the first win for reshoring since 2013, and the number of companies reporting new reshoring and FDI set a new record (1,484 companies). Reshoring will continue to be key to U.S. manufacturing and economic recovery in 2021 and beyond.

Hard lessons learned from the 2020 pandemic taught us that we needed to rebuild and re-establish our U.S. supply-chain ecosystem. The systemic shock to our global supply chains left us with bottlenecks, shortages and an acute awareness of our overdependence on imports.

My last column was a brief introduction to the Reshoring Initiative’s resources and some best practices regarding what companies can do to accelerate reshoring to gain business. Now we would like to discuss in more detail how your company or your customers can use the free online Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Estimator® to more accurately determine the real P&L impact of reshoring or offshoring. Doing so will probably prove that some work should come back.

It’s hard to believe how much has changed in the past year. When I wrote my annual April column in early March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t yet a reality in the United States.

The mission of the nonprofit Reshoring Initiative is to grow U.S. and North American manufacturing by 40%, eliminating the trade deficit. The objective of this column series is to help you get more than your share of that growth.