This has nothing to do with kitesurfing, but of a huge interest to me personally. And with a topic in the kitesurfing section on knockoff china kites ATM I thought why not.

After the recent Pacific brands decision to move offshore it is interesting the issues all Australians face, And we can't just blame the bosses of these companies because the customer are voting with their wallets

Were I work we build a longrange fuel tanks for 4wd's and are sold by ARB a well know brand around the world.
Fuel tanks would be considered a niche market, but still an important & strategic product line in the industry.
WE generally are considered to have a well built product and have a good reputation in the market place.

We employ about 30 people in Newcastle and have been going for about 30yrs.
Most of our products are sold wholesale to the one customer who in turn sell around Australia & the world.

We are facing competition from other ozi companies copying ozi made products importing and selling at cheaper prices.
I know the wages in Thailand are around $60 per week for a good welder

The people that buy our products are both retail and fleet

It would appear the fleet market is easily swayed by cheaper prices and jump ship to save a buck.
A large % of the retail market also buy on price.

That only leaves a small market share left if you try and stick it out selling to the "Buy Australian" faithful.

We also face an uphill battle keeping our only major customer as they also need to compete, they often loose sales of not only our product, but all the other gear that might go with the very large orders.
These are often large fleet deals that include hundreds of vehicles at a time.
In order for our largest customer to compete, they also face the question of should they make their own tanks and import themselves so they don't loose sales of all their own products.

Do we stay Australian made and possible die a slow death at the hands of the buying public? (but it feels good to be keep jobs in Australia for as long as we can)
Do we join the masses and start up manufacturing overseas?
Is it inevitable that all labour intensive products will be made in cheaper countries?

These are the questions that will face Most Australian manufacturing business were there is a large labour content in their product and someone else can see a buck to be made.

Interested in any comments??

So what are you doing to protect whatever intellectual property you put into your products, or are you giving your Chinese manufacturing Ozi competitors a free ride on your design? Have you considered registering the designs of new tanks you develop? Are there any innovative or inventive features in your products, and if so, did you ever contemplate getting patent protection for those inniovations, or at least seeking professional advice as to whether or how those features might be protected?

There can be little doubt that Asian manufacturers can nearly always produce a comparable product for less, but how often have those manufacturers been able to design and develop those products by themselves? They ain't dumb over there, but I would say that they are way behind when it comes to designing a new product from scratch. So unless you are prepared to protect your IP, and that will usually cost, just like any other form of insurance, then I'm with your competitor, who saves on R&D, and on manufacturing cost, for a virtually identical product. If there's no IP to protect, then I think your competitor is working smarter than you, because they get the free ride in design and possibly a bigger margin.

Food for though?

With the protection of designs, asian countries dont worry about it anyway, they will copy ANYTHING, the patent / Reg design only comes into effect when the items are imported into Australia and sold. This is the time that the challenge would be made.

I agree manufacturing in Australia is limited, my comment to people facing difficult times is become VERY familar with the transport, logistics, container unloading, and wharehousing these industries are taking over from the manufacturing of items.

2 products, same quality, same costs, one is $50 the other $75 dollars.

9 times out of 10 you go the 50 dollar product ? Why ?

Question. Is the back up service ,attitude ,assistencce to replace and do warrenty work worth paying the extra $25 for exactly the same product to be Australian made and more expensive.

Or do you replace your back foot strap ? at least if the product you purchased for 50 dollars does **** it self your feet remain comfortable.

If you by the 75 dollar product and it ****s it self in the same time frame

Your feet are left in the cold

Quality not Quantity or is it Quantity not Quality ?

Cheep scab labour is here to stay. BUT (In a different form)
It is now just easyer and cheeper to get it all set up from over seas.

Now all you got to do is convince me the quality and warrenty is as good.

MID NIGHT OIL (The rich get richer and the poor get the picture.)

Are 2 barrel rides for the session better than 50 huge round house cut backs ?

When we have finished selling everything off and committed our self relience to overseas labour


THE SLAVE WILL BECOME THE MASTER

THE SLAVE BECOMES THE MASTER

Any industry that does something that can be done overseas is vulnerable to being shipped overseas, whether its accounting, pharmacy, information technology, manufacturing or any other industry.

There are more engineering graduates coming out of China than the USA. The days of cheap Chinese knockoffs is passing and the time of development from China is approaching.

Its been said many times but for Australia to prosper we need to work on our natural advantages. We have plenty of iron ore, coal and other minerals. Instead of shipping raw materials overseas we should be refining and processing them here. Our environment should give us natural advantages in certain industries such as solar hot water systems. However what advantages we had seem to have disappeared.

The government won't raise tariffs. For better or worse there are international agreements which prohibit Australia from doing so.

i dont understand..
aus made bonds boxers sell for ex. 12 dollars and the company employes an employee at 18 bucks an hour...

overseas made bond boxers costs 12 dollars to consumer still (us) but cost 60 cents an hour to make...

is this really saving us "consumers" money or just filling the greed of businessmans wallets.

i disagree the **** gets cheaper to make and is less quality but still costs the same. the only difference is how much the middle man can put in his wallet.

Couldn't agree more with these, but there are so many factors that will force these jobs OS like consumers demanding cheaper prices and companies looking for more profit, these are driving factors the free world is based on.

cranky said...

By buying local (where possible) the job you save may eventually be your own.

busterwa said...

funny how countries with almost zero natural resources like japan, switzerland and ireland, have astronomical labor costs, are 3 of the leading OECD countries.

we cant compete with developing nations on labor costs. full stop. nor should we want to.

slave becomes the master, what a bunch of hysterical nonsense. adapt, play smarter, use the game to your advantage.

for four straight elections the majority of australians voted for a bloke giving tax cuts to high paid mine workers amongst others, whilst destroying the education system. and invested diddly squat into infrastructure.

china's wealthiest man, is an....australian. he asked the govt to invest $1m into technology he worked on at syd uni. got nothing. so he asked the country of his parents birth. what do you know, now the worlds leading, and heres the punch line, maker of SOLAR panels. which one of the sunniest countries in the world knocked back. and not just the govt either, no private backers put their hands up. no unions were interested in a solution to provide many high paying jobs in an expanding industry.

lets not miss any more of these opportunities

the problem we have here is that know one wants to work, we all want to go windurfing/kiting....lucky Australia is BIG we can start selling it bit by bit to pay for our habit.