Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Manufacturing and Importing Your Product from Asia

By Davina Cruella Sandwich

Organisations have been having their products mass produced in and around Southern China (now recognisable world-wide as the manufacturing capital of the planet) for more years than I care to remember.

The main reason for this is because the currency in China (Yuan) is worth a lot less than British currency, American currency, or most other currencies for that matter.

That is pretty much the main reason that a lot of companies source their products from Asia. I mean, what more reason does a company need to do something if its going to save them lots of money in the long term? But there are some other advantages, and a few disadvantages.

As far as the advantages go they are few, but pretty big. The price I have already mentioned, but there is a severe difference in the currencies. For every one British pound you get 11.2 Chinese Yuan, so you really can pay peanuts for what you want.

Also, you can get in with the Chinese trading industry, and if you can become known among them, this can be infinitely advantageous. Another advantage is that you will undoubtedly wind up closer to the raw materials you need, hence you save money on that as well!

The disadvantages, I would say, are severely disproportionate to the advantages in that they seem relatively insignificant. The main disadvantage is the shipping cost. Actually getting your produced product back to the UK/USA/wherever you are based can be a bit pricey, but compared with the money you will have saved on the actual production, I think this is an insignificance.

Also there's the time that the shipping takes, this could be seen as a greater disadvantage as, depending on level of demand, it could result in loss of turnover. Another disadvantage is that there may be some issues with production quality nearer the beginning of manufacturing as the factory staff become acclimatised to your product, but if you get a good sourcing company to do the communications for you, then you should end up with a high quality production line from start to finish. As well as that, it is difficult to predict what the local conditions are going to be like, financial or otherwise.

In summary, it is my personal belief that sourcing form low cost countries such as Southern China is far more advantageous to businesses than domestic sourcing.

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