What makes the Asians successful? Is it just low labour costs? Or better organization?
The trick with the Japanese is they maximized the efficiencies of the high cost parts of production such as inventory, capital costs, and distribution. They also analysed the demos of their markets to the nth degree. I saw them do that in stereos and cameras, as you always ran into a jr. Japanese engineer speaking good English who asked questions of consumers "in the street". When domestic manufacturers were still trying to sell consoles and clock radios, the Japs were rolling out modular high end stereo equipment that matched the new consumer's taste in music and their budget. They had to know how long product lines would last and numbers to build, and what features to include. Their analysis of tech markets had to be tried out in Japan, and once perfected, it was rolled out in NA and Europe with a vengeance. They key is they were fair engineers, (consider the Zero and their naval night time optics) and even better traders and marketeers. European tastes never matched NA's. Penetration of markets was always different. Price points different too. So Praktica could compete against Pentax for decades, despite being far behind in basic consumer features. Once the Japs correctly analyzed the market, the Minolta and Nikon, very well engineered, but very different equipment, captured the market. It is interesting to note that the Germans under Praktica, Leitz and Contax actually had the innovation and lenses, (Edixa had the first progammed aperture camera), but in the case of the Edixa Elektronika, their hidebound boss Wirgin trashed it from traditionalist principles. Others got bogged down in bad models, and excess minutiae. A poor man's Leica was never made. Minolta grabbed the idea of automation of photography and with a superb marketing effort and good engineering doomed many of the German camera manufacturers. The Germans had tried for years to make things offshore, but never succeeded, largely because they did not know who was buying their cameras. Eventually it was clear. Too few.
Several things distinguished Japan's marketing. Favouring of their market efforts by US post war rebuilding and retooling, new approaches made possible in the rebuild, slightly cheaper overall labour costs, (largely offset by the higher marketing and shipping costs) and practically zero interest rates and easy access to capital.) Japanese investment into R&D partly due to the low interest rate exceeded NA by good factor. It was not all big business, but a synergy of Japanese business that made them work. Small Japanese manufacturers often did as well as Mitsubishi-owned industries. They could niche market on the coattails of the big boys by correctly analysing small parts of the huge and varied US market. A Cosina could enter the market and leverage other people's stuff/lenses designs and make a living out of demos ignored by high volume consumer business.
What does this demonstrate? well not all the manufacturing coming in here that was made in Japan was designed in Japan. The great lens marketer from California, Vivitar, made a living by maximally leveraging technology and taking advantage of better manufacturing costs and standards of Japan. They designed lense by harnessing some of the first instances of super computer clusters in the lower 48, and then took the designs to a bevy of Japanese manufacturers who were making high quality but you never heard of. Like Tokina and Zuiko. The Japanese in general had such a high standard of industry that it did not matter who made the lens. One plant was as good as another. From this US-Japanese symbiosis came the superb Vivitar series one macro lenses, which today cannot be exceeded in quality. And the "engineer here and manufacture there" ran right across the goods of North America. We stopped making stuff. The question is to North Americans: is this trade-off of our engineering and their manufacture tenable? Will it bring us well into the 21st century?
What will this trend, still continuing, do to our society, many of whom are literally thrown out of work? The mill man or factory hand is not a computer programmer. We cannot all trade over to knowledge industry. Can we compete by automating factories? What do we do in the meantime? I have seen the results are not all good. I like the Asian goods and their costs, but I don't like the homeless in the streets and the difficulty getting anything made in our country, or the lack of a technical engineering base to manufacturing. We use to make all our own mining equipment and it matched industry needs very closely. Offshore stuff may not. Can we depend on other nations to make all our stuff? I have my doubts. What irks me is the obviouse ways in which we have painted ourselves in a corner, assuming our unions are righteous and our tax structures and stand offish banks who won't visit our own industry are the way to go. I will not pay 5000 dollars for an inferior camera made in this country. We have to step back and devise a new industrial strategy. It bugs me that at the turn of the century Canadians made our own designs of motor cars. 50 of them were made in Ontario. But today no Canadian makes a Canadian designed kitty car in the largest car consuming nation in the world bar none. Is this right? Where is the CDN designed electric hybrid fuel cell town car? Never thought of. Where is the CDN designed and manufactured scoop tram? Gone in that case. We are sitting on our dumb haunches.
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