Not made in China

Anyone immersed in the world of kids in recent years cannot but have remarked on how everything, everywhere, seems to come from China. Vacationing in Europe, you visit local toy stores to bring back something a bit different, and it's all the same products, all from you-know-where. The exceptions are few enough that they really stand out -- three notables being Playmobil, Lego, and Ravensburger, profiled in a New York Times article today. But surprise, surprise: Playmobil's products are not lead-free:

Playmobil's medieval knights and Roman warriors are coated with shiny paint -- brilliant reds, jaunty yellows and such -- which Ms. Schauer said contained lead, albeit well below levels hazardous to children. To ensure the safety of its coating process, she said, Playmobil kept close watch over its manufacturing process.

And is this the case elsewhere, too?

Ms. Schauer said Playmobil, a family-owned company in Zirndorf, Germany, faced intense pressure to move production to China. Most of the industry was moving there, she said, and German banks did not want to lend money to companies to build toy factories at home.

What the companies discovered, though, was while China's unit labor costs were a fraction of those in the West -- the equivalent of $1.50 an hour compared with $30 an hour in western Germany -- the distance between China and the companies' biggest markets eroded some of that cost advantage.

It takes some pretty major inefficiencies to offset such a vast wage differential -- but those inefficiencies, which clearly go beyond the distances involved, are exactly what allow the quality control problems that have landed made in China products in the spotlight recently.

Posted by David on September 18, 2007 7:57 AM