manufacturing vs resale?

Do you really expect anyone to say X-number of members are doing this?
Most people on here are affiliates or resellers. But a few smart ones have their own operations in place.

I currently do both.

What niche are you focusing on? Do you have the intellectual property locked down for your production item (patent, trademark, etc)?

to be totally honest with you, here's what I'm thinking:

I'm a manufacturing engineer who has worked at Toyota. Toyota is known worldwide for the "Toyota Production System" (also known as lean manufacturing), a system of philosophies, techniques and tools that are highly effective at creating extremely high quality, efficient manufacturing processes by working with the employees and making their jobs better rather than merely "cracking the whip"

I badly want to be self employed, so I'm searching around for a potential niche. One I had considered was helping physical product entrepreneurs make their businesses more successful and profitable by teaching them this system over the internet. I like the idea since internet entrepreneurs are pretty easily found online and this market is already accustomed to paying for online courses, ebooks, etc... to improve their skills.

However, after doing some more research I'm now kind of down on the idea. It seems its in-vogue for physical product engineers to have as little to do with their actual product as possible. Its pretty common for people to brag about how they never see the product or how its made. It looks like the subset of this market that is in any way associated with manufacturing is rather minuscule.

So, this suggests my target niche should be something more like contract manufacturers. Unfortunately, my Mandarin is a little on the rusty side...

i think that manufacturing is a very bad idea. You can not compete with the large factories no matter what you are manufacturing, they have chain of suppliers and they get a very good price for the things they need in the manufacturing process so that is the first reason why you will end up with a product 10-15 % more expensive than the product they are selling. Also, the work for is another thing, they pay very low salaries to people in China and other countries and because their process is automatized they are able to produce many items per hours which reduces the cost of work force. Also, there is a thing called change of market, when one thing is not selling as good or not at all as before, because every product has an expiration date, for example cds, video recorders, dvd players etc. and if you are manufacturing something, you will have to change the product in the future, and that is costly. So stick to dropshipp and resale, that way if you find some contact with the manufacturing company you will have a great profit margin and you will be making a lot of money, and also you won't have any physical contact with the product.