Chinese watch industry: perception and reality

[Stian]

Interesting discussion, but I think it misses the key point. Machines are machines and the same machine can obviously create the same results anywhere in the world. There is however a machinist setting the machine up and he/she is under various pressures for the final product. These pressures come from the manager and ultimately from the company culture.

The problem with Chinese manufacturing is not abilty, it is quality control. They can (and do) create some of the best products in the world, but without a culture strictly controlling the quality of the product, most Chinese manufacturers are more looking for a quick buck on a half decent product than a long time relationship based on a product that delights the customer. That will probably change over time, but for now it is a sad fact. 

Japanese and Swiss cultures are very different from this, with a massive focus on personal and corporate integrity, which is why they are so well suited to making high grade watches. The same can be said of Germany and a few other European countries although these are more diversified industry-wise than Switzerland. 

My view on this is based on three years of working with Chinese watch manufacturers and on having Chinese family and friends. 

Edited November 8, 2021 by Stian

[david]

The problem with Chinese manufacturing is not abilty, it is quality control.

This is an excellent point. I would like to add that due to the form of government in China,  negative feedback is not welcome and can be met with harsh consequences. Rocking the proverbial boat can result in imprisonment or a death sentence if a ranking party member holds an executive position in a company and feels offended.  If a quality control inspector tells the VP in charge of the operation that the products manufactured under his control are bad, the inspector might end up being arrested.   Changing a business model under that type of government   can sometimes have dire results.  

[jdm]

On 11/8/2021 at 10:47 AM, Stian said:

The problem with Chinese manufacturing is not abilty, it is quality control.

Are we talking strictly about about manufacturing, or about the entire industrial process, from idea to design and prototyping? While the first is proverbially marginal, perhaps with the only exceptions are when the customer is able to oversee Quality Control himself, as the (partially) Western owned factories can do, or can inspect the goods before payment and delivery (much more difficult).
And I doubt very much that China of today is at the top, even when willing, when it comes to idea and design. Watches are no exception, the very top of their domestic production is a Seagull tourbillion, which was made probably more as a demonstration than something they had expectation to sell in large quantities. Other sectors are actually much more advanced, as train transport, aerospace, and anything military. Still, there is non where China distinctly leads. And I still have to see (pardon the ultra popular example) a Chinese car or motorcycle that can be brought up to comparison with Western or Japanese products.

Incidentally, I normally advocate buying Chinese product, for watchmaking or other purposes. The reason is that I believe that is right for everyone in the West and even more in less developed countries, to be able to buy certain goods, be for work, hobby or fashion and entertainment, that they could not afford before.
At the same time I'm at time quite disappointed with the product "shortcuts" that often I see in what I buy (please don't get me started), and more importantly, I'm ethically torn about my (our) purchases going to the continuation and success of a repressive imperialist regime of the worst kind.
But since life is anyway full of contradictions, I just have to get along with all that.

 

On 11/8/2021 at 10:47 AM, Stian said:

They can (and do) create some of the best products in the world,

On the same line of my reasoning above. If we replace 'create' with 'produce' I agree with that. It's not a subtle difference when  it comes to a lot of extremely important global scenarios that still have to fuly develop.

[spectre6000]

1 hour ago, david said:

The problem with Chinese manufacturing is not abilty, it is quality control.

This is an excellent point. I would like to add that due to the form of government in China,  negative feedback is not welcome and can be met with harsh consequences. Rocking the proverbial boat can result in imprisonment or a death sentence if a ranking party member holds an executive position in a company and feels offended.  If a quality control inspector tells the VP in charge of the operation that the products manufactured under his control are bad, the inspector might end up being arrested.   Changing a business model under that type of government   can sometimes have dire results.  

Is it really that draconian? I don't have any significant direct experience with Chinese industry, and what I do have was brief and more than a decade ago. I get the feeling this is more stereotype than reality, kinda like the "death to America" Iranian stereotype that Nuce Joe obviously fails to embody. I'm sure instances of these stereotypes exist, but is it enough of a norm to really make these sorts of claims?

[jdm]

12 hours ago, spectre6000 said:

 I'm sure instances of these stereotypes exist, but is it enough of a norm to really make these sorts of claims?

Maybe it's not a norm, maybe Quality Control engineers are not on the top of the list, but the Chinese regime indeed has no much problem in giving death and life sentences to those that cross into their will. Examples, top grade officials probably not more corrupt than their colleagues, but which may have somehow crossed the line. Of important people that is just critical of the regime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_Zhiqiang
That is when one is brought in front of their parody of justice, in other cases e.g. Hong Kong intellectuals, Jack Ma, and Confucio knows how many others, people disappears for a while and then comes back wonderfully re-educated.
However, other people, also extremely important like "belt brother" Xu Jiayin manages to get away with managing "his" company to grow bottomless debt.

It's is a big mistake to think that China has adopted "Western values" since relations were normalized. But they adopted  private property and limitless enrichment, the latter it's not even a value in my opinion.

[david]

 

Is it really that draconian?  

Look what happened to Jack Ma.  He quickly went from being the most admired man in China to facing a possible imprisonment or execution. He rocked the boat and big brother didn't like it. The example the Chinese Communist Government made of him sent a clear message to the entire population of China. 

If a person in charge of a manufacturing operation is part of the Communist Party structure and a lowly inspector points out that his products are crap,   the bureaucrat isn't likely to change the operation in order to improve the products. The inspector will be viewed as an unpatriotic nuisance and the next inspector will know to keep his opinions to himself.   

Edited November 8, 2021 by david

[HectorLooi]

China is advancing so quickly that it is scaring the Western world. But lets not talk about the politics.

I find that workers in China and for that matter, many other countries, do not put much emphasis on quality, work ethics and pride in their work. They are more concern about their output, completing the job and going home.

I have been down to a number of dental labs and seen their technicians working. I've observed the work attitudes of technicians from different countries and it is very obvious. You can easily spot a technician from Germany or Japan.

I don't know if it's a cultural thing or what, but technicians from Germany and Japan take pride in their work. Maybe because they come from a more affluent society, they have the luxury of devoting more time and energy on their craft. It's like the theory of Hierarchy of Needs, only when the needs of the lower hierarchies are satisfied, then can the needs of the higher hierarchies be sought after.

But with China's rapidly growing wealth, they too will have the luxury to start addressing areas in which they are lagging. So, watch out World. Better start getting your grandkids to learn Mandarin.

[Michael1962]

I was always intrigued that the common language that was used in Serenity and Firefly was Chinese.

Doesn't seem so far fetched though.

[WatchWood]

4 hours ago, HectorLooi said:

I don't know if it's a cultural thing....

I think that plays a large part. One of the reasons Britain led the way in science and technology going back a few hundred years was not that we had better people but because those people had less regard for bureaucracy. Whilst European inventors had to deal with their respective Scientific Societies and Guilds to get their ideas into market the Brits just got on with it! Harrison, who solved the Longitude problem, was a carpenter. He wouldn't have been listened to had he been born in Europe at the time. We like mavericks.

[spectre6000]

Then along came the Americans, who ditched the British class system, and ran off with the torch. Following that logic, what baggage is it the Chinese are shedding as they get up to speed and start to lead the relay race?

Love the Firefly reference. One of the best science fiction shows to date. I wouldn't say it was the common language so much as the primary seasoning sprinkled over the common language (English). Mostly just used for swearing on TV in a way the censors wouldn't get upset over.

Edited November 9, 2021 by spectre6000

[WatchWood]

3 hours ago, spectre6000 said:

.... Following that logic, what baggage is it the Chinese are shedding ..

That would have to be hegemony.......not that they'll get the chance!

I read something a while ago along the lines that, throughout history, empire tend to fade after 300 years; one common indicator being excessive rewards for their sports stars and when they start venerating their chefs. I don't see China being much of a global powerhouse because of the political system they use - when you put that much effort into controlling your populace you don't get much opportunity to sell the dream.

[david]

 They are more concern about their output, completing the job and going home.

I think politics actually does affect the work ethic of employees.  I served in the US Army from 1069 to 1971 which, like a dictatorship style of government (China,  North Korea etc), made the people who work there  feel they had no say in their working conditions. This style of management  tends to devalue the individual worker to a point of just doing the bare minimum to survive. The slack attitude of  workplace management put an emphasis on hustle and little or no emphasis on quality.   One example was the garbage food that was prepared in the army mess halls.  The people who cooked it could have done a better job but were only rated on how fast they did it. This caused terrible morale issues with the soldiers.  I served stateside but the situation for the soldiers who had to go to VietNam had it even worse.  The cooks would sell the food to local restaurants.  When soldiers came back from a patrol they were told that the mess hall was out of food. Instead of just lousy food they received no food.   This had a terrible effect on the morale of the soldiers and their job performance. If somebody complained they would become a target and would not be put up for promotion. The end result was a sub mediocre workforce.   In general, this is what happens when employees have no say in their working situation.  Add numerous other issues to this and you end up with an unhappy workforce that just does the bare minimum to get by. The result is often low quality. 

To be fair to the current US Army, lessons were learned from the VietNam era experience and conditions have improved for the soldiers. The result is a better army with soldiers who have more of a sense of craftsmanship  than the army I served in. 

[WatchWood]

13 minutes ago, david said:

...  Add numerous other issues to this and you end up with an unhappy workforce that just does the bare minimum to get by.

That has been my experience of most organisations - you do what you are told, not what you think you are employed to do! I used to work for an organisation that had a 'helpline'. I was once told off by a colleague for giving away our 'secrets' because I told a caller how to calculate something any child could have helped them with - their logic was that I should have offered to do it for them so we could charge for it. There was no concept that the people you actually 'help' are the ones who come back!

[david]

 There was no concept that the people you actually 'help' are the ones who come back!

That is a good point but the company management probably didn't see a value in establishing good business relationships that may have required an up front sacrifice. It seems to have soured the relationship you had with that company.  Helping out a potential customer often pays off in unexpected ways.   

Take Mark Lovick's watch videos for example.  He began the business by offering informational watch repair videos free of charge on YouTube and built it into a great business.  Nobody else that I know of tried that and have not been as successful. I took all three of his courses but had it not been for his YouTube videos, I never would have heard of him. 

[HectorLooi]

5 hours ago, david said:

 I served in the US Army from 1069 to 1971 which, like a dictatorship style of government (China,  North Korea etc), made the people who work there  feel they had no say in their working conditions.

Wow! That would make you about 970 years old. 

Were you conscripted or volunteer? 

I was a recruit in the early 80's and served in the reserves till early 2000. And I have seen the food transformation first hand. Food was so bad in the 80's that we'd be in the canteen, paying for our meals the first chance we got. Then in the 2000's, the canteen operator was complaining that business was bad because the food in the mess hall was too good!

I spent a short time on a base which also housed the school of army catering. Our dental clinic was directly opposite the mess hall and for some reason the cooks were especially nice to doctors. We used to get really good cakes, pastries and desserts delivered to us at the medical centre. At lunch, we would get an extra dish at the doctors table, which the base commander didn't even get. Until the new commander put out an order that the doctors were not to receive preferential treatment. 

But back to the topic, the cooks were capable of producing better work, it's just that they chose to make us miserable because they were miserable. So, it's not the lack of talent or knowledge but the attitude of the people. If the Chinese worker could be motivated correctly (humanely), they could become a workforce to be reckoned with.

[david]

Wow! That would make you about 970 years old.

I'm 73 and will be 74 in a few months. I was drafted in 1969 when the army was looking for targets. I think the military strategy at that time was to keep sending people over there until the North Vietnamese ran out of bullets. I ended up with better conditions than many others. I played flute and piccolo in the 98th Army Band at Fort Rucker Alabama (02G20 MOS) for the first half of my service. The second half was playing guitar in the pit orchestra for the 3rd US Army Soldier Show. I remained stateside because my MOS was considered to be rare and critical; go figure.

The video above is an accurate description of how things were at that time. 

[watchweasol]

Having read all these posts I think its fair to say  that most people including the Chinese workers do not lack the talent to do a first class job but lack the motivation due to the upper eschelons attitude to wards its workers and the product it produces.  It it is produced to a standard that works well enough, so why the extra spit and polish. Others like Sellitia will go the extra mile for the quality.  I am old enough to remember when the Japanese watch industry was in its infancy and had a reputation like the Lada car but unlike Lada they pulled them selves up to the standard they are at to day which holds its own within the industry today and in some cases it is a market leader in innovation and design. Many people will disagree with that statement but its all a matter of preference. The Japanese industry Is free in supplying the parts to the independents and also the technical documentation required, Not something one could say about the Swiss closed shop practice as now Swatch controls the industry wholesale.   The communist ideal is brilliant in theory where all peoples are the same but in practice falls apart because there are always those who are in charge who think they are better than there fellow man and as such treat the "lower"classes (workers) .  with complete distain They are there to do a job and that's it period.

[Michael1962]

Third hand story, but relates to the topic.

A friend of mine knows a guy that started up a furniture business. He sent off a sample of a leg for a table he had designed and wanted to produce. The samples (more than one) that he got back from the company in China were all excellent. So he writes out and sets up a contract with them.

He then gets his first container of legs from China. Opens and checks them and then sent the entire contents back to China. All of it was out of spec.

Great output to get the contract and then turn out whatever. No quality control.

[WatchWood]

13 hours ago, david said:

 ... It seems to have soured the relationship you had with that company.  Helping out a potential customer often pays off in unexpected ways.  

It spurred me on to leave and become my own boss, albeit in a different discipline. Bizarrely though they became my first paying customer because I could do the job cheaper and quicker than they could in-house!

I went to quote for some work last year, along with others. I turned down the work explaining, in detail,  to the customer that they would have been throwing away good money on something that wouldn't have achieved what they thought it would. The other bidders just wanted the work. They are now one of my most regular customers. Honesty pays.

3 hours ago, Michael1962 said:

Great output to get the contract and then turn out whatever. No quality control.

A friend spends a lot of time in China dealing with QC issues that never arise when he's there but do when he's back here. He's never figured out the root cause and finds it frustrating because they know what they are meant to be doing (and are very good at it) but something always goes awry!

[dadistic]

I've been warned about price negotiation with Chinese manufacturers. It seems that they will try and hit any price that you request, it's just that the quality will suffer in their attempt to make money at that price.

Be careful what you ask for

 

[Plato]

Maybe it's about time Western countries stopped turning their noses up at mass manufacturing? 

(Germany excluded) 

Weren't the British and American Empires built on manufacturing and slave labour? It's China's turn now, learn to accept it. 

[Michael1962]

That would be a lot like the emails that went around saying "Don't fill up for the next two days and the fuel companies will have to pay megabucks in demurrage etc". That was in response to fuel prices going up.

A worldwide embargo on Chinese products cannot and will not ever happen.

[WatchWood]

11 hours ago, Plato said:

Maybe it's about time Western countries stopped turning their noses up at mass manufacturing? 

(Germany excluded) 

Weren't the British and American Empires built on manufacturing and slave labour? It's China's turn now, learn to accept it. 

I don't think people are in denial about where most of their purchases originate or that they are mass-manufactured. I've rarely been disappointed by my Chinese-made purchases. I think people are unaware of how much oversight is required (by the seller) to ensure that standards are maintained in the supply chain. If they ever manage to do that unaided then they would be a force to be reckoned with. I don't see that happening under their current political system. The only advantage they hold, at present, is 'cost' but that is being lost to other countries as the rising wealth expectations of their population results in demand for higher wages.

[spectre6000]

I've been thinking about this a bit over the last few days. There definitely are cultural differences at play. I recall in some B-school class or another talking about negotiating with Asian cultures. Patience, don't feel required to speak, and specificity were topics that come to mind. The Japanese are known to think silently as a cultural norm, and that messes with American heads who like to keep things moving with words, and will end up negotiating against themselves just because someone wanted a second to consider what had previously been said. A few years back, my dad went over to S Korea to set up their equivalent of the FAA. He was appalled at some of the engineering ethics issues that seemed to be cultural; specifically coming to mind was something that would clearly fail, but it would take a year or two. The response was that "I'll be off on some other project then, and it'll be someone else's problem". That seemed to be a pervasive mentality, and if it's happening with aircraft, it's likely much worse elsewhere. With that knowledge, I've started seeing symptoms of that particular cultural detail crop up in Korean products. For instance, the "SAMSUNG" logo on the stove that came with our house being glued on with an oil soluble adhesive. A few years worth of breakfast bacon down the road, and that sticker just slides right off. Easy and obvious dumb thing to do, but it was someone else's problem down the road. I'm not sure I'd have noticed these things in the past as anything more than generic quality issues or something along those lines, but now that I've been made aware of... whatever you'd call that, I can't unsee it.

The recollection of the B-school recommendations about dealing with Chinese was specificity. They do what you (or whomever) tell them. Exactly. If you want a 1cm +/-0.01mm cube with crisp edges in 316, and say I need a "metal thing (maybe you don't know the Mandarin for cube?), 1cm by 1cm by 1cm", you'll get exactly that. But someone else is also telling them they're there to make a profit, and part of the energy will be spent on that as well. Doing exactly as they're told, you'll get a metal thing (whatever metal was cheap that day), measuring roughly (you didn't specify a tolerance) 1cm across three points, but not necessarily in the dimensions you imagined, or as clean.

What often happens, is importers will go to a factory that makes such and such a widget, and say they want a particular flavor doodad. If they aren't specific about something, the profit directive kicks in, and that's what they get. More frequently, you have factories that make some particular flavor doodad, and the importers order off a menu of sorts, and they have various option boxes they can check. Each box has a dollar amount, and is associated with some particular specification (ball bearing vs oiled bushing say). Harbor Freight, as an example, will come in and check none of the boxes, while Home Depot's Husky will check all of them. You end up with more or less identical looking tools (with stickers and colors for each brand of course), but dramatically different levels of quality. At this particular point in our cultural consumerist psychology, our default position when faced with cheap junk is that it must be Chinese, while we don't really think too much about the origins of the product that didn't fail us, despite origins being different from the former only temporally. The product might even be Indian, or Bengali, or Russian (we don't get a ton of Russian stuff over here) or whatever.

The cultural bottom line, I guess... Feels pretty stereotypy, but seems that's what we're doing here, is that the Chinese (typically) do exactly what they're told to do, whereas western cultures (typically) have a shared understanding of where assumptions are to be made. Importers trying to make a quick buck or making bad assumptions is a big part of the disconnect. The Chinese can make some incredible things, but only if that's what's in the contract.

The design and engineering impetus question though... Where are the original Chinese products? I don't have an answer for that from B-school or any personal experience. Maybe it's a matter of economic ascension, and will be upon us soon? We're educating a lot of Chinese students here in the US, who go back to China to do the things they've been educated in. Maybe it's just a matter of time?

[jdm]

1 hour ago, spectre6000 said:

But someone else is also telling them they're there to make a profit, and part of the energy will be spent on that as well.

Another second hand (how many Westerners do really know about Chinese culture ?) notion that I've heard. When someone is clever and able to make money with with "business shortcuts", he's placed in high regard. Any single time I spoke with someone that deals with Chinese I have heard the same thing: "be aware. They will ship anything which nominally fulfills the order". That's not good, however one twists the matter.