It isn't in China's best interest to continue to flood the market, but what can western marketers do but to buy Chinese goods for resale when the Chinese Riminbi (yuan) is so grossly devalued?
As of today, the exchange rate of dollars to Riminbi is about 1 :12. (Actual value of the rmb today is a little over 7.97 cents). That means that one American dollar will buy about 12 Rmb. Compared to the Rmb, the dollar has HUGE buying power. The British Pound now has approximately DOUBLE the value of the USD, so its purchasing power is even greater. 1 BP to 16 Rmb.
As of today, China is mostly interested in putting its people to work to elevate them from the poverty that has persisted since feudal times. (Depending upon to whom you speak, those days began to come to a close with the passing of China's last emperor, Chairman Mao and the rise of Zhou En Lai).
Since the emphasis is on productivity, money is being DUMPED into capital improvements everywhere. Little Mom and Pop shops are being given money to expand their businesses from roll-up garage door businesses to glassed-in, glitzy, chi chi boutiques.
The same is happening in manufacturing. Compared to the Philip Morris cigarette manufacturing plant in Kannapolis, North Carolina, the plant in HuaiAn, PRC is a monster. The Chinese plant employs about 3,000-4,000 people who work around-the-clock, cranking out tobacco products faster than you can say Jackie Chan.
(Smokers: have you noticed that your favorite brand seems to be burning faster and has the strange smell of old tennis shoes?).
What's the quality of all of these mass-produced products? Those who comply with international standards are producing excellent products. For example: Chinese fire extinguishing products now put out fires rather than combusting upon being sprayed on a fire. (This is no joke. One manufacturer of extinguishing chemicals used acetone in its formula to make certain proteins break down. With no quality control, it once mass produced a boatload of this stuff with 10x the amount of required acetone which was put into hand held extinguishers and sold to restaurants. Can you say "Blackened Chinese Restaurant?).
What's happening now is that there are a lot of so-so- to pretty good Chinese products flooding the world market. In their rush to get to market, Chinese manufacturers try to meet basic requirements and nothing more. There's just no time for a plant that produces nearly a million musical instruments per year to spend time on "little" things like regulating a horn, checking the accuracy of the facing (if the facing stats are even known!). The Chinese manufacturing mindset is that the mouthpiece or sax meets minimum standards as required by the purchaser-exporter/importer and it's up to the foreign seller to add value to it by regulating it, replacing parts (such as the synthetic products used on Chinese horns) with traditional, western parts and materials).
One of the things which compounds the problem for the single-product buyer is that ON THE WHOLE, the domestic sellers aren't even opening the boxes when they arrive in their store. They are doing absolutely nothing to create value. So what the domestic consumer gets is a pretty good product which fails miserably to meet his expectations. Forget the fact that the product's value and performance could be enhanced greatly if the buyer would invest a little time and/or money into something that he paid so little for. The American consumer expects everything to be Perfect Right Out of the Box (PROB).
This won't happen for awhile. It took Japan almost thirty years to meet the western consumer's expectations. It took Taiwan a little less time to catch on because it took longer for Taiwan to get the capital to stand on its own twenty million feet and begin exporting after WWII. By then, it had a Japanese/American business model.
But to get back to the cheap Chinese mouthpiece. My recommendation is for you to send it to one of the artisans on the board and add value and playability to you incredibly inexpensive mouthpiece. Send it to Mojo Bari or one of the other refacers on this board to have it tweaked, and then send it to Jason Dumars to have it engraved. Voila! You'll have a Du Bari mouthpiece, the first in existence!
If you buy Chinese and buy blindly, be prepared for a surprise.
And be prepared to add value to the product yourself.
PS. I apologise for the length of my post. I also apologise for apparently hijacking the thread, but I think that the post has some relevance.