The title of this post comes from a terrific NPR Marketplace article of the same name. If you are doing anything related to manufacturing in China, this is the one article you should read this year. The article is based on a question Chinese Premier Li Keqiang asked in Beijing earlier this month. Li went
Renaud Anjoran over at the Quality Inspection Blog has written a post that anyone who has products made in a foreign country should read. The post is entitled, How to Protect against Copies when you Manufacture in China, and it makes for an excellent guide on how to prevent your manufacturer from copying your products.
China’s recently stepped up efforts to root out unregistered foreign businesses in China has caused a rash of China consultants to retain the China lawyers at my law firm. From our work in forming China WFOEs (wholly foreign owned entities) for these consultants, we have discovered that many China consultants are falling dangerously short in
As my law firm’s Vietnam practice continues to grow, I have become fascinated with how companies decide where to outsource their product manufacturing as between China and Vietnam, both for new products and for products currently being made in China. One of the reasons I am so fascinated by this is because so many factors
Let the hate mail begin. Whenever we write on how things are getting bad for foreign companies doing business in China and on how foreign companies should think long and hard before doing business in China, we get hate mail or hate comments (which we typically delete). Many of these come from China consultants accuse
Many of our clients that went to China years ago to have their products made there are now interested in selling those same products within China. One way to do that is to form a WFOE for selling the products, but oftentimes the cost and the hassle of doing that is not worth it, especially
The goal of this post is to start a discussion on how and why to diversify away from China. Does a China plus one strategy make sense and if so, why? Earlier this week, I wrote an article, China Plus One: How Vietnam’s Riots Help American Businesses, the theme of which is that Vietnam —
Just got off the phone with a client who asked me to provide it with a “term sheet template” for buying product from a Vietnamese manufacturer. We generally advise our clients reach agreement on “key terms” before we start drafting their Manufacturing Contract. It is not productive for us to start drafting a manufacturing contract
We have written a number of times about the need to register intellectual property in China with the appropriate authorities. And we usually put particular emphasis on registering trademarks in China, because doing so is an easy, obvious, and relatively economical first step in IP protection. But for those selling or manufacturing products in China,
Whenever I give a speech or write an article or post about what it takes to succeed in international outsourced manufacturing , I invariably list “a good partner” as item one. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am always getting asked how to find the “good partner”. My initial response is usually to say “with great care.”
