Universal Joints!!??

[stevebroad]

Agree.

Many "reputable" UK companies import from China, rebrand and sell as their own.

Even "Made in UK" means very little. My brother-in-law designed and sells a security device. It is made in China but as the lock barrel is installed in the UK it can be classed as made in the UK and have this stated on the box!

The much hyped Go Pro cameras are claimed by the company to me made in the good ol' US of A. However, take them apart and there are a lot of parts with "made in China" stamped on them. I bought a top of the range Go Pro lookalike from China for ?70 and it is great - video quality indistinguishable from the market leader and a couple of hundred pounds cheaper.

My carbon fibre tubes come from China at around half price including shipping. I can buy 5 pneumatic fittings (SMC) including shipping for the price of one over here.

There is crap made in China, agreed, but there is here in the UK also.

[The Veg]

1) China will make whatever you want, to any quality-point or price-point you want. If one and/or both aren't to your liking, don't blame China, blame whoever hired China to make the stuff.

2) My brother is a technology-journalist and has reviewed a lot of the action-cams...he says GoPro is nowhere near the best, but everybody thinks it is the best because it has the best marketing/hype-machine behind it. This of course would not be the first time that such a situation has existed in an industry.

[stevebroad]

You only have to go back a few years to the VHS/Betamax era. Advertising/hype will usually trump quality.

[The Veg]

Yep. Then more recently HD-DVD was a better system than Blu-Ray, but lost because it didn't have a cool name that was easy to hype.

[nomad]

The quality or cost of Chinese goods should not be the issue IMO. There is no comparison between China and Japan. When we set up the Marshall plan with Japan they were a defeated and dependent country who had had their try at world domination at the tip of a bayonet. They had adopted democracy while China is a totalitarian country with no intention on being democratic who are intent on world domination by Yuan! Rotten dirty tricks by China are constant while we, apparently have no choice but to turn a blind eye. Rather than using their wealth to buy our goods they are instead buying us. Smithfield foods last year...the worlds largest vertically integrated pork producer. As a farmer we were told that we would be rolling in the dough from all our exports to China as their standard of living improved but that has not occurred. Instead Chinese company's have gone into Africa and are plowing that country up to produce what they want. They are also doing in all the elephants for ivory and when the wild life is gone just look at all the arable land that will be available. The list is endless. Hacking, piracy and now building island's to take territory.

Not the least bit related to Elan's so I'm done!

Kurt.

[prezoom]

While participating with another marque car club, we visited a local manufacturing facility. The owner explained they made almost all their parts in house. He had tried China, with the idea of reducing costs, but found the quality of the parts he was receiving was dismal. Rejecting over 70% of what he was receiving. After multiple trips to China, in an attempt to rectify the situation, what he found was, the China manufacturing plant was outsourcing his parts to Africa for manufacture. Other than a specific valve, manufactured in Germany, everything, including plating is currently done in house. This may explain some of the problems we are finding with "so called" Chinese manufactured parts.

[Sea Ranch]

Wonderful discussion.

Obviously everyone would like their country to have robust design/engineering/manufacturing industries. It's when a country wants to "supply the world" that things get out of whack.

Side note (on one of the above side notes): VHS, a Philips invention, was made available to all manufacturing comers, ie. Philips licensed their stuff (remember the compact cassette, vhs, cd, dvd?). Sony always wanted the exclusive "world domination" route: they would not license the beta system. The world looked at that and moved on. Really, the same could be said for Microsoft's domination of the pc market: they licensed, Apple refused (and still does). (Though currently things are working pretty well for Apple, aren't they?)

Anyway, back to regular content/programming. . . . .

Randy

[Chancer]

If you do something better than the competition and/or at a lower price you will get the lions share of the business

Companies and I suppose even countries try to create a competitive advantage and if I remember my learning from a previous life, "a competitive advantage is a structural and sustainable difference that allows you to create goods and services better than and/or at lower cost than the competition" - i.e. something that cant just be copied.

Now I dont know whether China has an ambition to supply the world or they just do it better and get the business, do they have a competitive advantage? I think that the old established manufacturing countries threw away their competitive advantage d?cades ago.