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Intellectual property theft is no longer a distant, abstract risk; it’s a reality that costs the U.S. economy up to $600 billion every year, according to the IP Commission. For companies building physical products, that threat often starts at the factory floor.
As entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary put it bluntly, sending your designs overseas, particularly to countries where copying and reverse engineering are widespread, is like “handing your IP to a competitor for free.” He’s not wrong.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter how advanced your product is if someone else can replicate it and sell it cheaper. No firewall or software patch can protect you if the vulnerability is baked into your supply chain.
To protect your IP, it begins with where and how you manufacture.
The Global Manufacturing Trap
Offshoring has long been seen as a cost-effective path, especially for startups and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) under pressure to move quickly and scale up. But for companies building high-value, IP-sensitive products, that approach carries real and often irreversible risks.
Forbes reports that one in five U.S. companies operating in overseas markets, especially in China, have faced IP theft or forced technology transfer. And that’s just the number willing to report it. The real figure may be much higher.
In regions where replication is common and enforcement is weak, your product can be reverse-engineered, rebranded, and resold, sometimes before your own version ships. The legal recourse in these jurisdictions is limited at best. Even when you have a case, the costs, delays, and political complexity often make it unwinnable.
This doesn't just hurt revenue, it damages your brand, undermines investor confidence, and stalls innovation cycles.
The risks of offshoring include:
- Intellectual property theft with little legal recourse
- Forced disclosure of proprietary designs or source code
- Supply chain opacity makes it hard to track who has access to your designs
- Inconsistent compliance standards, particularly in cybersecurity and data handling
- Reputational damage if clones or low-quality copies flood the market
At a glance, the economics of overseas manufacturing may look appealing. But for innovation-led businesses, the long-term cost is often paid in lost control and diminished trust.
Why North American Manufacturing Is a Strategic Advantage
Reshoring isn’t just a political talking point; it’s a growing strategic shift. According to a recent Boston Consulting Group report, 70% of companies now cite risk mitigation as one of the main reasons for bringing manufacturing back to North America. And it’s not hard to see why.
When you manufacture locally, you gain more than just proximity. You gain visibility into your supply chain, faster access to your engineering teams, and a level of control that’s difficult to replicate overseas. In an era where products involve firmware, encryption, and cloud connectivity, that control isn’t just convenient, it’s necessary.
On the legal front, the difference is just as stark. Countries like the U.S. and Canada rank among the strongest globally for IP law enforcement and recourse, according to OECD and USPTO rankings. That means when your product is built here, your rights are better protected by the law and by enforceable precedent.
Local manufacturing also aligns more naturally with today’s cybersecurity expectations. Whether you’re working to meet zero-trust architecture principles, follow NIST standards, or prepare for SEC or CISA cybersecurity guidance, doing it close to home simplifies compliance.
For companies building secure, connected products, North American manufacturing isn't just about pride of origin. It’s about reducing risk, staying compliant, and keeping innovation protected at every stage of development.
The Technical Reality: Security Begins at the Hardware Level
In today’s industrial landscape, cybersecurity isn’t just a software concern; it’s a hardware imperative. As more systems move to the edge and rely on embedded connectivity, the physical device itself becomes a potential point of attack. And once a vulnerability is baked into hardware or firmware, it’s incredibly difficult to detect or fix post-fabrication.
This is why secure-by-design principles are gaining ground across regulated industries. A key component of this shift is the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a hardware-based security chip that creates a root of trust at the silicon level. TPMs help ensure that only verified, untampered firmware is allowed to boot, and they enable critical features like encrypted storage and secure device identity.
According to Gartner, by 2025, 30% of regulated devices will include TPM or equivalent trust anchors, up from just 10% in 2020. McKinsey further reports that companies leveraging secure hardware design saw 30–40% fewer cybersecurity incidents, particularly at the edge.
Key reasons secure hardware matters:
- Prevents tampering at the firmware and BIOS level
- Enables cryptographic integrity and device authentication
- Supports zero-trust frameworks with hardware-based trust anchors
- Reduces long-term attack surface across distributed systems
Both NIST and the World Economic Forum emphasize that secure hardware is foundational to building zero-trust architectures. And that security is far easier to guarantee when your devices are built under trusted, transparent conditions, not thousands of miles away, out of reach.
Security Starts Where You Build: The BlackPearl Approach
In a global economy shaped by speed and scale, the pressure to outsource manufacturing is real, but so are the consequences. Intellectual property theft now costs the U.S. economy up to $600 billion a year. That number isn’t theoretical. It’s the result of companies handing over proprietary designs to regions where reverse engineering is normalized, enforcement is weak, and legal recourse is almost nonexistent.
As investor Kevin O’Leary put it plainly: “Manufacturing in China is like handing your IP to your competitor.” We’ve seen it happen. We’ve seen how it ends.
At BlackPearl, we’ve made a different choice, one that prioritizes security, control, and trust over cost-cutting. From initial design through prototyping and full-scale manufacturing, every step occurs in North America, with our headquarters located in The Woodlands, Texas, and our manufacturing operations based in Canada.
We don’t rely on third-party assemblers with opaque processes or questionable practices. We build what we sell, and we do it with security built in, not bolted on.
Every product in the Interceptor line is designed with Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) embedded at the hardware level, delivering:
Every Interceptor product is built with TPM 2.0 embedded at the hardware level, because security shouldn’t be an afterthought.
Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) deliver a robust suite of protections, including:
- On-device encryption to safeguard sensitive data at rest
- Tamper resistance with traceability back to origin
- Remote attestation so devices can verify their security posture externally
- Platform integrity checks and key management to ensure system trust from power-on
By combining advanced TPM 2.0 capabilities with Interceptor’s edge intelligence, we provide not just smarter monitoring but secure, verifiable, and uncompromised data infrastructure.
By choosing BlackPearl, you're not just buying rugged, high-performance industrial hardware. You're choosing a partner that understands what’s at stake: your IP, your reputation, and your future. In an era defined by risk, we build with one goal in mind: giving you complete confidence in every layer of your technology stack.
Because when it comes to protecting innovation, security starts where you build.
