http://money.aol.com/usat/general/canvas3/_a/recent-product-recalls-made-in-china-and/20070725144809990001Do Cheap Chinese Goods Have to Mean Trade-Off in Quality?
by David J. Lynch
What Products Are Safe?
Killer pet food. Tainted toothpaste. Tires lacking an essential safety component. And now, seafood laced with potentially unhealthy levels of antibiotics.
Suddenly, "Made in China" looks like another way of saying: "Buyer beware."
In recent years, American consumers eagerly snapped up an ever-widening array of Chinese-made products, from Wal-Mart (WMT) T-shirts and Dell (DELL) laptops to Black & Decker (BDK) power drills and Ethan Allen (ETH) cabinets. It's no secret why multinational companies increased their reliance on Chinese factories: lower production costs. The recent spate of suspect Chinese imports, however, is raising troubling questions about the trade-offs involved in the relentless pursuit of rock-bottom prices.
"Sometimes, it's a shock to discover how poor the quality processes are," says Sebastien Breteau, chief executive of Asia Inspection, a Hong Kong company that audits Chinese factories for 158 U.S. companies. "It's very, very common that the goods you receive are not exactly what you ordered, either because the factory can't deliver or because the definition of the product is not clear enough."
New Danger: China finds problems with kids' snacks
Breteau should know. In the mid-1990s, he started a small trading company in Hong Kong, specializing in inexpensive gifts manufactured in southern China. When word got out that he was personally inspecting his suppliers, other traders asked him to do the same for them.
Now, he has almost 1,000 clients from 58 countries. His inspectors performed about 25,000 one-day factory checks last year, with 23% of the facilities earning failing grades because of poor factory hygiene, inaccurate product manuals, cosmetic blemishes on finished goods, even installation of the wrong electrical plug.
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