Getting the balance on the quality story

One of the best commentators on Asia affairs and particularly US-Asian affairs is UCLA professor Tom Plate. I have given up subscribing to most e-mail newsletter which clutter my mail box and never get read. Plate's Pacific Perspectives columns are a notable exception.

As the China quality issue looms increasingly large, I was interested to catch up on this column from a month ago, long before Mattel's humiliating climb down. As is so often the case, Plate has picked up the complex currents of this story much more accurately than most other - often hysterical - commentators.

Plate's basic points is that there are certainly incompetent and sometimes wicked businesses in China which produce poor stuff. But there are also incompetent brand owners and regulators in the US which, combined with HUGE price pressure from the chain discount retailers, are as much to blame for this mess as the Chinese manufacturers. Arguably, solutions will need to come as much from Bentonville, Arkansas as they will from Beijing.

What has this all got to do with B2B media? The biggest publishers (online and in print) and trade fair organisers in the region are serving the consumer merchandise sourcing business. The pendulum has swung far to far towards Asia for American companies to have any hope of bringing manufacturing back into the US. But, the uncertainties and cheap political point scoring we're currently witnessing will surely hold back some companies for a while and we may see a small slow down this autumn in that sourcing-related business.

We shall see.