Postby GraemeF » Sun Apr 04, 2004 2:06 am
At the risk of getting Mr Shogren stirred up to the point he has to give another set of kites away to irritate me, whilst seriously upsetting some thoroughly decent folk, I feel I have to correct the previous two posters and add my three happorth.
Materials are actually a key part of the cost in China. The reason almost the entire world has decended upon them is the essentially cheap labour, if you want to reduce your costs, you use cheaper materials.
Most materials are imported into China, in fact there is currently a shortage of Teijin material, which is a key product in kite production. At the moment, the worktables that usually produce Cabrinha kites are empty for lack of it.(This will only be very temporary, Cabrinha as most of you are aware is part of Neil Pryde, a very well respected manufacturer with good resourcing capability.)
Problem was the Japanese manufacturer wasn't making enough margin because in the greater scheme of things, kite production counts for the square root of diddly squat to these Giant material companies. So a cheaper production facility had to be found, but nobody told all the Chinese manufacturers in time, and only a few had the volume guarantees to get orders in on time.
A lot of kite companies do have proprietory formulated material (notably takoon, who have spent most on R&D in this area) but this has to be reserved long in advance of production and large quantities guaranteed, so sometimes in-house factory deals are cut.
Whilst this is all going on, and completely co-incidently, the Chinese economy has become overheated. There are severe power outages, some factorys are now on a three day week. The Chinese ain't telling anyone this (Its a "face" thing which always brings on denial over there), but if you care to study the serious financial press, you'll find some quite rightly concerned articles about the situation, since we've all become used to the delights of ever cheaper product from our industrious and economic friends.
So you might find a shortage of Chinese products generally, not to mention some prices increasing due to their ties to the weakening dollar (They use dollars to buy yen costed materials) and of course they are using the moment having secured this huge volume of the worlds manufacturing base.
So it could be Mr Shogren has chosen just the wrong moment to launch a volume price based business model, perhaps if he's quick, he can interest some more investors into buying it on the upswing, who knows...
Logic says get them quick while they're cheap, but I think I'd be inclined to be very certain there was stock available before I committed my plastic, and you simply cannot take the word of the well meaning chaps on here who have been given free kites.
And in answer to the question of why buy them at all, it is only because they are cheap, whatever you read, they are definitely not a patch on Naish, Cabrinha, Slingshot. and are unlikely to stand the test of time as well as those brands 2003 models.
Ask yourself how well they'd be selling if like E.H. kites they tried to start up through normal channels.
