This is old news, announced a few months ago. The reality is that SRAM moved IGH production to Taiwan several years ago and that about coincided with them abandoning 5 and 7s hub production with the intention of conquering the world with G8 and G9 hubs (which were meant to work with an e-drive BTW). They didn't sell so that didn't work.
They also started making a new version of the 3s hub, with a really stupid design that used a cable that ran around a tight radius into the hub (instead of a toggle chain). The stupid cable will break after a short period of time anyway and if you are daft enough to unscrew it whilst it is still in one piece, you will find that you cannot replace a used cable without taking the hub apart. A new cable isn't (wasn't) very expensive and can be fitted without taking the hub apart, (provided you don't still have half the old cable stuck inside the hub....
). But that is no consolation if you don't have a new cable, of course.
To cap it all the revised 3s design was faulty so that the failure rate on these newer hubs is way higher than it should be. A fault I have seen several times is that there is a snap ring which stops the high gear pawl pins from sliding out. Amazingly the idiot that designed this part made it of a length that, (when installed) has a gap between the ends big enough to let a pawl pin slide out. Duh! This causes the most spectacular hub smash-ups imaginable (think no re-usuable parts inside) and (presumably because the gap starts out in the wrong place in some cases and in others the snap ring moves in service) the failure can occur in the first week or the first year.
So SRAM abandoned production of all IGHs over 3s about eighteen months ago, leaving 2s and 3s hubs. The most recent announcement was that even these (and all spares) were to be discontinued. At one time (in the not too distant past) Sachs/SRAM made 1,000,000 IGHs a year (or more) but in the last year they made only a tenth of that; not enough to have a half-decent business. The 3s hubs have been so bad that no-one wants them. At least one LBS proprietor has told me that they wouldn't have bikes with recent SRAM IGHs in as a gift, they have caused so much trouble.
Needless to say there is a global market for simple 3s IGHs that is many tens of millions, which SA and Shimano now have between them, to the almost complete exclusion of others.
BTW I have had plenty of experience of faulty SRAM 5s and 7s hubs. Invariably the problems have been entirely with (or have at least started with) the crappy clickboxes, pushrods and shifters. By comparison the hub internals seem very well made; it clearly takes about ten times longer (than the typical life of the crappy external parts) for the working parts of the hub to wear out or break. Plenty of such hubs are scrapped because the mean time to failure (on hard working bikes that see any real weather) of the external parts is too short for folk to be bothered with.
I have a scheme for conversion of such 5s and 7s hubs to use two toggle chains (one each end of the hub, a bit like they used to use many years ago) and two 3s shifters instead; this conversion will be both more reliable and the (external) parts will be continue to be available.
I think there are such things as pattern shifters for the traditional 3s torpedo hubs; these are (IME) complete rubbish, but may continue to be available. Whilst a standard SA trigger won't always work a SRAM 3s hub OK some of the more recent SA 3s shifters have a slight different cable pull and may work better with SRAM 3s hubs.
cheers
