Texto gentilmente enviado pelo Dr. Quaresma Neto, antigo docente de Marketing do ISCSP.
“Some people I know just came back from China and were very impressed. While the total Brazilian production of a given product is one million units, one single Chinese plant produces forty million units of the same product. The quality is equivalent already. And their speed of reaction is impressive. The Chinese will place any product in the market in a matter of weeks…With prices that are a fraction of the ones that prevail here. One of their plants is moving to the countryside because the monthly wages in the region where it is established today are too high: 100 dollars. An equivalent Brazilian worker will earn 300 dollars a month at least. Which, with taxes and benefits added, will amount to almost 600 dollars. If you compare to the 100 dollars in China, with virtually zero benefits…Overtime pay? In China? Forget it. People there are just so thankful for having a job that they will work overtime knowing they will get nothing extra in return… This is the Chinese trap. Which is not a commercial strategy, but a power strategy. The Chinese are taking advantage of the western marketers’ attitude of preferring to outsource production and keep the “value-added” portion: the brand. Hardly ever will you buy a US-made product in the large US retail store networks. Everything is made in China, with a US brand. Companies are making tons of money buying from the Chinese for cents and selling for hundreds of dollars… Even at the expense of closing their own plants. That is what I call a “venomous price strategy”. While westerners outsource their tactics and make money in the short term, China assimilates these tactics to prevail in the long term. The big marketing powers may keep their brands, design… The Chinese will keep the production and dismantle the western industrial parks bit by bit. Soon enough, for example, there will not be tennis shoe plants around the world. Only in China. Which will then increase its prices and produce a “manufacturing shock”, just like that of oil in the past. And the world will realize that rebuilding its plans will be prohibitively expensive. It will realize it has been taken hostage by the dragon it fed. The dragon that will increase prices even more because the dragon is the boss, the dragon owns the plants, inventories, jobs… An inversion of the game that will have the impact of an atomic bomb… a Chinese atomic bomb. On that day, the “venomous price” executives will sadly stare at the skeletons of their old plants, the retired workers playing checkers at the park, the scraps of their dismantled manufacturing compounds. And they will long for the time when they made money buying cheap from the Chinese and selling expensive to their fellow countrymen…And then, glumly, they will open their brown bags and eat their brands.”
Luciano Pires
