The company I work for buys a hell of a lot of stuff from China, and quality is very mixed. If you’re willing to pay appropriate prices it is possible to get stuff which is actually a lot better than you would get from an equivalent american or european supplier. Thing is, most people go all out to get the cheapest prices they can from China and don’t do proper quality control/process control. That’s when you get crap products or safety issues.
We might all be penalised for poor quality tools in time.
The environmental cost in producing a crap tool, particularly power tools, can’t be significantly lower than the environmental cost in producing a good quality one. It might even be higher if we compare industrial environmental controls in developed countries with those in China.
A cheap power drill still needs a lot of copper winding and a chuck and a case and solder etc, which are still going to be made from the same basic mineral sources in crap and quality tools. The same with cheap tungsten blades, which are likely to throw teeth or break in the first few hours of use unlike, say, my 25 year old Sandvik tungsten tipped blade which has been resharpened many times (each resharpening at a cost which exceeds the cost of some cheap blades, and even sets of three or four cheap tungsten tipped blades for smaller saws!). The cheap tools are going to have much the same effect as quality ones in landfill when they’re broken. They’re just going to get there a lot, lot quicker and in much bigger numbers, not least because they’re not valuable enough to repair.
A separate aspect of tools and the environment is that our big box hardware chain is now selling CO2 cylinders to power compressed air tools, for people who don’t have a compressor. Seems a bit odd, given all the concern about CO2 in the atmosphere.
True, but there’s a culture in much of Chinese industry which aims to shave costs wherever it can, regardless of specifications. The samples are made to specs, but not the production run. In China it’s not always a case of getting what you pay for. You often don’t get even what you pay for, at any level.
I’ve heard the following sort of story quite a bit over the years.
Friday, November 23, 2007
China mistake a drag for one local manufacturer
Boston Business Journal - by Naomi R. Kooker Journal staffHadley Pollet, owner and president of Hadley Pollet LLC, stopped offshoring her manufacturing work to China in the wake of shoddy workmanship and patent-infringement issues.
Hadley Pollet had been in business designing and selling fashion accessories for four years when she started manufacturing 80 percent of her products in China. Her goal was to shave costs.
After a year, Pollet had had it. She says faulty products not made to her specs, wrong sizes and shoddy workmanship cost the company, Hadley Pollet LLC, half a million dollars in losses. She has also been embroiled in a dispute over intellectual property theft.
“It was a one-ring circus,” said Pollet, whose company is in Brighton. “It’s like the Wild West over there. You don’t know what the truth is.”
This year Pollet pulled out of China. She already has re-established manufacturing ties in the United States, including outfits in Boston, New Hampshire and New York and is getting her $2 million business back on its feet.
At a time when Boston businesses are increasingly turning to China and other countries to outsource their manufacturing, Pollet’s is a cautionary tale on navigating complicated waters. While many manufacturers have had positive experiences, outsourcing veterans agree it takes careful planning to make those relationships work.
In addition, intellectual property infringement – a common problem in China – can cost tens of thousands to defend. Pollet said if she hadn’t manufactured in China, she would not have the infringement issues she has now.
“People have been burned, others have had great success. It’s not a panacea – just going offshore to solve your manufacturing problems,” said Brian Gilmore, executive vice president of Associated Industries of Massachusetts, the state’s largest industry trade group. “Unless you’re organized to run efficiently, just pushing the work off-shore isn’t going to necessarily solve problems.”
Pollet, who designs belts, bags and headbands, wasn’t looking for a panacea. She set out to manufacture in China for reasons others do: It’s easier and it’s cheaper.In the United States, Pollet has to source all the individual pieces that go into making a product, like a belt, herself. In China, you give a business contact the finished sample product and the manufacturer produces all the pieces, she says. “When you send it over to China, they handle the whole kit and caboodle.”
She says she used reliable references to get up and running China. However, her contact, a woman who managed production in China, wasn’t following through: Pollet would ask for an antique brass belt buckle, and the belt would arrive with a regular brass buckle.
Pollet said handbags that had woven handles arrived without adhesive on the handles, so they unraveled. “We had to recall $200,000 worth of bags,” she said. One time a shipment of belts that were supposed to be adult sized came in as children’s sizes, she said.
“It cost us $56,000. We just disposed of them,” she said.
In terms of counterfeit products, Pollet has spent the past two years tracking the illegal reproduction of her products. “It’s all been tracking back to being made in China,” she said, surmising it’s cost the company $20,000 to fight the infringements.
Pollet now spends anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 a year to manufacture in the United States. Since she’s decided to stay here, business is booming. In the past week Pollet has added 10 new stores to her retail list.
“Now that I’ve shifted my manufacturing, it’s as if the universe has decided to give us the gift of more business,” she said.
http://www.bizjournals.com/masshightech/othercities/boston/stories/2007/11/26/story6.html?b=1196053200^1554192&page=2
If you’re inspecting a sample batch but not samples from everything you get in then you deserve everything that happens to you for being that stupid IMHO. That woman in the article sounds like a total moron for instance.
To give you some idea of what is involved when you want to do it right, last year we seconded two UK employees from our purchasing department of my factory to China for a year (one to Hong Kong, the other to Shanghai) in addition to the local employees we already had over there. Even then, they were only buying relatively simple parts with no IP in them - right now it simply doesn’t make sense to make the complicated and expensive bits out there due in our case to the extremely high cost of failure. Simply put, the saving of a few pounds per part maximum in moving a part to China is offset by the shipping cost and the risk of it destroying a £10,000 device with the associated warranty/reputation costs.
As more and more manufacturers of consumer goods outsource production to China, and greater numbers of domestic employment disappears, there comes a time when the act of outsourcing destroys the customer base the manufacturer depended upon.
At what point do the companies that undermine their own countries economy through these practices become some type of economic traitor?
In Australia’s case, at least 15 years ago in clothing, textiles and footwear, followed since by a range of other industries that have gone completely or largely offshore, mostly to China. A country that can’t make its own clothing, footwear, textiles and many basic consumer goods is in trouble. Exactly the reverse of where we were in the sixties and seventies. We can’t even make our own bloody underpants any more!
The principle of comparative advantage is all very well, but where does that leave country A that’s exported its productive capacity to cheaper country B when country B becomes sufficiently wealthy to float its currency to its true value and country A loses its purchasing power? Which is what’s going to happen with China, sooner or later.
Governments forget, and businesses don’t care, that industrial capacity is critical if we get into a war, which in the foreseeable future could well involve guess who as the enemy?
That’d be right. China.
Maybe they can give us a warning, so we can stock up on underpants for the duration.
Yawn. Sorry guys, but that’s just protectionist claptrap. What is happening is that the low value manufacturing is moving to China. The high value manufacturing (machine tools, etc.) is resolutely not moving to China, nor is any of the design.
The net result is that 90% by value of most products made in China stays in the west, and that substantial quantities of high value goods are exported to China to support their manufacturing economy. My company for instance manufactures in the South-East of England, with a very high fraction of our exports going to China.
For the while…
They already today could themself produse a lot of highly value manufacturing things as microcontrlolers, aircraft turbo-jets , submarine and rocket engines.
So i rathe thing this is just the matter of time when the China will fully technilogically independent.
What wrong with this?
Is this a gult of “cheaper country B” that capitalists of state A in aim of super-profits move all plants to the B?
If you care about it - just forbid your bas… capitalists to export the industry out of your states;)
You can’t forbid that in a democratic system, all you can do is impose tariffs on imports (which have been proven time and time again to be a waste of time effort and money).
RS*, it was discovered a while back that the MoD was procuring uniforms made in… wait for it… China. That’s what the bureaucracy calls “smart” procurement…
Microprocessors manufactured in China are almost universally designed in California, Japan or Taiwan - and my company are one of the bigger suppliers of the machine tools to manufacture microprocessors with (biggest in what we do).
Aircraft turbo jets - until very recently, the most advanced engine China could produce was a knock-off of the Rolls-Royce Spey, an engine designed in the late 1950s. They have started to produce more modern engines, but these are largely Russian designs manufactured under license. There is a WHOLE lot more to jet engines than just manufacturing it - the amount of technology in an advanced engine is awesome, and because of the amount of time they spend in the air a percentage point in fuel consumption is enough to make the difference between a best seller and a dud.
Submarine and rocket engines - they’re welcome to it. The market for those is tiny, so if they make them that’s money they aren’t spending on something they can sell instead of me
Closely followed by increasingly high value manufacturing at an accelerating rate in future.
Based on this set of four leading indicators, Israel and China received the highest composite scores of the 15 nations examined. Both appear to be positioning themselves for future prominence as exporters of technology products in the global marketplace. Israel ranked first in national orientation based on strong governmental and cultural support promoting technology production, and first in socioeconomic infrastructure because of its large number of trained scientists and engineers, its highly regarded industrial research enterprise, and its contribution to scientific knowledge. Israel placed second and third on the two remaining indicators (figure 6-21 , appendix tables 6-9 , 6-10 , and 6-11 ).
China 's composite score for 2005 fell just short of Israel’s, but the rise in its overall score over the past 2 years is noteworthy. China showed improvement in all four indicators and significant improvement in three: national orientation, technological infrastructure, and productive capacity. Its large population helped raise its score on several indicator components; this shows how scale effects, both in terms of large domestic demand for high-technology products and the ability to train large numbers of scientists and engineers, provide advantages to developing nations.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/c6/c6s4.htm
Review that statement in five or ten years. China is just post-war Japan all over again, but with vastly more potential, and expanding more rapidly.
A country that can build atomic weapons, run its own space program, and build an expanding navy can build anything it wants.
China has the capacity to do anything the West can, and in the not too distant future it will start taking a bigger share of that production, too.
Remember the UK shipyards, rendered largely irrelevant by about 1980 by Japan’s shipbuilding prowess?
That’s not the experience in the US.
A new study has found that the United States’ growing trade deficit with China has had an increasingly negative impact on the U.S. economy, causing job losses that reach into the most technologically advanced industries in the manufacturing sector and affect every state, according to a January 11 [2005] press release by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC).
http://usinfo.state.gov/ei/Archive/2005/Jan/12-31762.html
The US trade deficit with China doesn’t support the view that 90% of the value of most products stays in the US.
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html
Well, as long as they buy enough to last however long a war with China is going to last, what’s the problem?
Naturally, I’m assuming that they’ve thought of the possibility that there might be a war with China, which would cut off their uniform supply. I’m sure they would have thought of that, because they’re smart.
It’s unlike Australia buying the Leopard tank many moons ago, when our procurement people weren’t any smarter than they usually are. There was some disquiet at one stage when it was pointed out that while we’d bought a modest amount of spares, and bearing in mind this is when the Cold War was quite warm, we didn’t have an awful lot of spares. And if things got nasty in Europe, which was going to be the first NATO country to get rolled through by the Soviets? Thus creating some problems for our tank parts, especially if the European situation was reflected in trouble closer to us which rapidly chewed up our spare parts.
That is what i,m talking about.
Fully agree with Rising Sun. The state that could produce the space aircraft could do everything.
Sure the most of that they produse is the Licenzed western or russian technologies. Moreover often they simply steal the designs.
However if they could copy those things enough good- they could improve and developed it further it if they want
Just go easy on that.
Egorka and I started agreeing. We actually had a public love-in. Then he pretty much stopped posting.
Like I’ve said before, I need you around for a bit of conflict. 
Well i guess he just see that you begin to write his thought:)
So this is not need for him to post any more:)
Like I’ve said before, I need you around for a bit of conflict.
You know i could not bring just a “bit of conflict”- if i do begin the conflict - this could be a ONLY a big ONE , after than they USIALLY banned me for the few time.
So very true R.S. The West cannot afford an underpants gap! (sorry to plaigerize lines from Dr. Strangelove)
I dont care for Chinese produced foot wear either, never seems to fit right, I spend the extra greenbacks for american boots(yes they are still available) and they fit my US foot just fine… With all of the negative press China is getting these days for product contamination, one would think that their export industies would be starting to worry about losing business.
Wanna know why I’m focused on underpants with China?
'Cos if we go to war with them, I’m gonna be ruining underpants at a frightening rate.
But China IS PROTECTIONIST! And the perceived exchange that was supposed to benefit more Western manufacturers than just Boeing and maybe Caterpillar never surfaced. This is largely because of the Chinese trade stance and the disregard for human rights (or of humanity in general), worker protections, environmental regulations, and the tolerance of corruption despite to odd execution every now and then…
Granted, though there is some hyperbole, there is chemical contamination all over China that finds its way into goods (i.e the antifreeze ethyl-glycol in toothpaste), and of course, the lead paint on their toys…
It ain’t all China’s fault.
I bought three Irwin drill bit one foot extensions recently.
Pieces of crap, they are. Not rigid in use. Allen key grub screws stripped in no time on one, rounded out the heads on two with moderate pressure. Don’t know about the third, because I haven’t used that piece of shit yet, and probably won’t unless I need a poker for a very small fire.
Got the vernier caliper out and it confirmed my failing sight’s opinion. Slimmer shafts on the extensions. Slimmer head around the bit housing.
Slimmer grub screw with less thread.
No doubt inferior material all the way through.
Compared with what?
Compared with the same size Irwin extension I’ve been using for 30 or so years, made in the good ol’ US of A. It’s rigid in use and its grub screws have had a heap of pressure on them without complaining. It’s also a 12" extension where the new ones are 300mm, which is a metric 12".
Well, it’s not, because the old one is 12" / 300mm from the chuck end to the end of the shaft, plus about 30mm for the bit housing. The new ones are 300mm overall.
The new ones, which are crap, have “Guaranteed since 1885” printed on the bottom of their plastic wallets. The old one, which isn’t crap, didn’t. It didn’t need to, because when I bought it the name told me it was a reasonable quality tool.
Not like the modern crap that Irwin puts its name on, including crap but very cheap saw blades, that exemplify why once reliable names are going to hell in a handbasket in the race to produce the cheapest and least reliable shit in China for a stupid consumer public which wouldn’t know a good tool if it was up them.