Ask HN: Is it still worth manufacturing anything in your country after Alibaba?
After starting to earn a good amount of money as a dentist, I want to stop my own hamster wheel. Although I love my job, I'm just not into that routine work but creative works, like business, art, marketing etc. something that just makes sense to me, make me able to passively earn enough amount of money to be able to buy time to make those things happen what I find interesting my life.
Manufacturing goods as a business
In my opinion, the best way to do that is having a profession where you will always earn money and after that either starting a business or actively investing on stock markets (which is a little bit harder than business).
What I find interesting was "manufacturing things in cheap countries with high quality and export goods and sell in expensive countries". I was thinking about this for 10 years when I was a student at dentistry. I always thought about producing things in European Countries like Ukraine, Georgia (minimal monthly wage monthly only 7$ !) or Azerbaijan, and bringing to Germany to sell them here, where I live. Where most things 100 times more expensive than in Georgia.
Dropshipping
After Alibaba came to the market the rules of the game changed. Chinese manufacturers produce literally everything and so cheap that no one has even a chance to compete with them. Business owners even don't buy and sell things physically, more and more people just build businesses like playing a bridge role between Chinese sellers to the European buyers buy marketing the goods here, which is called nowadays dropshipping.
Question
Is there still any niche or something that worth producing in Europe/US and sell in Europe/US like in old days? Or should I just let Chinese manufacturers produce the goods cheaply in a given quality and sell it here?
I would like to hear opinions if here someone did business similar to this.