China Law Blog - China Manufacturing: The Real Story. - Comments http://www.chinalawblog.com/ China Law for Business en Copyright 2011 Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:36:51 -0800 Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:36:51 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.32-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Renaud It's amazing how many importers look for ways to avoid risks ONLY AFTER they have started purchasing in Asia and been burned.
They send good money without guarantee, but they don't pause to think "what if they ship some junk to me?"
Maybe they just assume it's as safe as buying domestically. Or maybe they think there is nothing they can do to improve their odds. Or maybe it's not an education problem, and they want to do it the cheap way? I don't know...

]]> http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16162 http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16162 China Business Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:08:01 -0800 Dan Bob Dylan I doubt there will be a next time for the person who already lost USD500,000.

]]> http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16163 http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16163 China Business Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:08:01 -0800 Dan Matthew Conover Also be careful how you find suppliers--being an Alibaba Gold Supplier or having an Alibaba Trustpass doesn't mean much. I wrote a blog post about how fraudulent suppliers can obtain an Alibaba Trustpass or Gold Supplier status by impersonation.

]]> http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16164 http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16164 China Business Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:08:01 -0800 Dan Jay (a different one) I think this post hits the spot in more ways than one (as you would expect from Dan's & CLB's most excellent blawg posts).

As far as I have been able to see, China manufacturing is all about low-cost and lower-cost still. Innovation, of which there is frightfully little as it is, is often limited to just the duplication in China of some process that was obsolete in US/Europe years ago, but because it is "new" in China, it is therefore classified as innovation. I work in a state-of-the-art innovative company/industry, and over the years, of our R&D budget of millions, the total amount actually spent on proper "R" and/or "D" is somewhere well behind the decimal point. The best we do is repeat what has been done before (whereby we cut costs by throwing out some QA anything to do with long-term planning).

Also, the "numbers" on manufacturing as mentioned in the post are flawed beyond adding up apples and turnips. Just looking at dollars obfuscates various underlying issues (besides turnips) such as whether the total number of widgets produced increases or not, or how these widgets are priced, relatively, or whether they can be compared at all, e.g. in terms of quality. In other words comparing China and US manufacturing $ for $ is wrong, since what's made for those $$ (or RMB) can't be readily compared in many cases. Turnips again.

Apart from that, it is not clear whether any increase in $$ can be attributed to more production (of widgets) or simply an increase in price (e.g. our labor costs went up last year by about 15% while the amount of turnips stayed roughly the same -- that is NOT a growth of 15% as our $$ figures might suggest).

]]> http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16165 http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16165 China Business Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:08:01 -0800 Dan Danny Dan, this is a great post. You constantly amaze me on such fantastic posts. I meet so many people like those you described here.

]]> http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16166 http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16166 China Business Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:08:01 -0800 Dan Adam Daniel Mezei Actually, the best advice I have for you is to take precautions to prevent this from happening the next time.

Company: Well thanks.

Me: Seriously, if there is going to be a next time, give me a call before you contract and we can work together both to minimize the likelihood of this sort of thing happening again and to better position you for recovery if it does.

Company: Okay, thanks.

~~~

I can't stop laughing!

]]> http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16167 http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16167 China Business Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:08:01 -0800 Dan Twofish It really depends on your criterion for "largest". If you define "large" as number of people employed, then I don't see how the US is going to be large by those standards.

I don't think that anyone thinks that China is leading in "manufacturing innovation". The thing about China is that it has a combination of a huge labor force and good infrastructure so that it can grow a massive economy without being particularly innovative.

The fact that Chinese manufacturing is "non-innovative" helps China to create a middle class, because China can take people with basic education, and then give them jobs that pay a lot more than they did before. The fact that US manufacturing is extremely technologically innovative creates a lot of challenges for the US economy. In order to do just about anything you have to have a masters degree, and what's worse, it creates an economy that is somewhat more inflexible. If you rely on labor intensive methods to create refrigerators and then suddenly people want toasters, it's pretty easy to retool.

If you have technological intensive methods then it's much, much harder for people to switch jobs.

]]> http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16168 http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/china_manufacturing_the_real_s.html#16168 China Business Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:08:01 -0800 Dan