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The ultimate irony: ‘Made in Vietnam’ goods sourced from China
Those electronic goods or home appliances, those shoes, shirts or cosmetics you bought thinking you were supporting local workers, may actually have been ordered from China by Vietnamese retailers.
Look-alikes
Vietnamese consumers, even the smartest ones, complain that they cannot recognize anymore which goods are imports and which are made in Vietnam.
Home appliances that have very European, American or Japanese-sounding brand names turn out to be brands created by Vietnamese firms that were ordered from Chinese suppliers.
At a certain Big C Supermarket, inquiring consumers are told that the “Blacker” brand electric cooker is a German product which is made in China. That’s half true; it turns out that the brand name was invented by a Vietnamese retailer to badge a product made in China.
Blue Stone is another home appliance brand that’s shown up here recently. Sales staff at Best Carings Can Tho Supermarket claim that these are US products made in China and imported by Vietnamese companies. The appliances’ red and blue colors evoke the American flag, so it is really easy to make people believe the advertising. It turns out, however, that the trademark was developed by a company in HCM City, while the products also come from China.
More and more such products have appeared on the Vietnamese market. If customers read the package labels carefully, they will find the words “made in China” or “designed in Italy.”
Another genre of goods found at supermarkets nowadays are clothes, shoes and sandals that bear Vietnamese-sounding brand names, but come from China, such as Hong Phat sandals, Phuong Quan shoes or Dung fashion.
Especially, many of the clothes for middle-aged people, cotton knits for women and shorts for men, seem to be sourced from China or Thailand, though they bear Vietnamese brand names.
“All roads lead from China”
“What we are doing now is no different from what Sony, Sanyo or Toshiba are doing. They are having their products outsourced to China,” a manufacturer who asked to be anonymous told Tuoi Tre newspaper.
Fierce competition forces Vietnamese manufacturers to do everything they can to reduce production costs, and that includes outsourcing some goods to China.
Nhung, who sells womens’ wear at a stall at An Dong Market in District 5 in HCM City, said the biggest difficulty for domestic workshops is getting materials. “My workers can do the most difficult garment operations, but it is very difficult to find fabric or the buttons on the products we want to copy. Therefore it’s logical to have such products outsourced to foreign countries and then labelled with Vietnamese brands. The products are mostly jeans and khaki pants and shorts,” Nhung said.
Tuoi Tre concludes that the concept of labor allocation in the global supply chain is not a new story any more. Nike, for example, no longer makes any shoes itself, but focuses on marketing, and research and development while outsourcing manufacturing to developing countries to take full advantage of low labor costs.
What’s different is that the famous brands all have experienced a long period of development, and they always make the production process clear on their labels. By contrast, their Vietnamese imitators are deliberately obscure. Asked why salesmen give vague answers when asked about the origin of the products, one entrepreneur admitted that his company hesitates to say that the products are Vietnamese designs manufactured in China.
The owner of another business told Tuoi Tre that Vietnamese investors couldn’t manufacture on a large enough scale to compete with world-known brands. Even if they set up such factories, the manufacturers will still have to import materials from China.
“If they did this, the higher production costs would discourage investors,” he said, adding that this economies of scale argument explains why Sony, Sharp and Toshiba do not make TVs in Vietnam any more.
All the Vietnamese enterprises say they commit to supervise the production process at the factories in China and take responsibility for the products’ quality.
vietnamnet, Tuoi tre
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