Describe how global competition affects US information technology operations?

Describe how global competition affects US information technology operations?
Global competition between business affects the minimum price a item can be marketed for due to the cumulative expenses involved in it manufacture.

What are all the inputs to a globally manufactured product?
- Location of "raw materials"?
- Location of "materials process facilities"?
- Location of "refineries or base component manufacturers"? (parts that go into an assembly)
- How many steps of stages are going into the assembly of the product?
- How much time elapses between component manufacture and assembly?
- Location components are stored before assembly?
-- (or are they not stored but ALWAYS "in transit" from manufacture point to final assembly point?)
- Location of final assembly?
- Transportation costs?
- Trade fees, import duties and tariffs?
-- (how many international borders will the components need to cross?)
- Final assembly costs?
- Storage of final assemblies prior to sale?
- Automated order processing costs?
- Shipment to the customer?

I have not taken courses in global economics, but I am willing to speculate on the answer as shown above and hope my input is of some use to the asking party.

If two or more companies can take steps to improve or reduce their costs at similar points in the above processes, then they can safely be considered to be in competition with each other. How will the quality of the end product be influenced by the workmanship of the component manufacturing process? Is there oversight or quality assurance from the beginning of the parts journey to the delivery of the final product to the customer?

What are the losses experienced by each company? Is there theft of component parts? Manufacturing defects? Other quality issues due to inferior "raw materials" being used to make the component subassemblies?

Finally in terms of transportation and storage, how are the products being handled? Were they packaged to make a long journey safely and without being damaged along the way? How many component subassemblies were lost due to mishandling or otherwise unpredicted loss (such as the sinking of a cargo ship)?

If you are specifically asking about the INFORMATION in Information Technology then we have to treat the "data" as the commodity being "mined" (obtained), "refined" (componentized), "stored" (in a data warehouse/database), "shipped" (transmitted over data lines), "groomed" (manipulated into a final format, file type or presentation) and "delivered" (or presented) to the customer.

There are certainly costs associated with every step of this journey from beginning to end and again, when any two companies are in the business of offering similar INFORMATION then they can be said to be in direct competition with each other.

Information can be of poor quality, can be mishandled or damaged, and certainly can be lost in transmission to the point of final assembly (before it is groomed).

"The least expensive data is rarely the BEST possible data."

Finally I would suggest the COST of information technology operations depends greatly on the passion of the people involved with those operations and whether or not they have a comfortable operating environment to work in, are supported by their organization, and are concerned with the actions taken by their customers BASED UPON the data delivered to them (the information). Whether or not the two companies remain in competition with each other for a long time or a short time depends more on the "perceived value" of the information delivered to the end customer and that repeat business.