A must-read: The Guardian reports on a British entrepreneur’s experiences with the Bright Mountain Motorcycle factory near Shanghai.
2 thoughts on “Another Tale of Chinese Woe”
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When scooter news breaks, we put it under a tarp in the garage.
A must-read: The Guardian reports on a British entrepreneur’s experiences with the Bright Mountain Motorcycle factory near Shanghai.
Comments are closed.
Yes, this company is train wreck, but the Brit is just as much at fault for not only not doing his homework about the company, but not bothering to learn anything about how business is done in China. Which really isn’t terribly different from the way business was done in Korea 20 years ago, and Japan 40 years ago.
And we never see the guy’s design. I have a feeling he’s some Mod wannabe who knows little about how scooters work but thinks he’s going to create a 21st-century Lambretta. Or maybe another Italjet Dragster, which would be even more pointless.
The Karmic wheel keeps on turning, and this company will ultimately go out of business because it can’t continue screwing over its customers and building crap. That’s Business 101…
Oh, sure, O, agreed. He’s CERTAINLY equally at fault, and the sad part is that rather than having learned a (very expensive) lesson about business, he’ll try to unload WHAT HE KNOWS TO BE shoddy bikes on an unsuspecting public, hoping to hide their shortcomings with PR and marketing, until the ‘next run,’ blaming the quality on the Chinese. There will never be a ‘next run,” the bikes are already a failure.
As we all know, many very high-quality products are made in China, many of the very complicated electronic and mechanical items we use every day. But they’re almost invariably produced for huge corporations that have spent decades geting burned by Chinese manufacturers, and learning from it, and generally these companies have enough money to scare a Chinese factory into submission and accountability, AND they have Chinese-speaking, Chinese-culture-acclimated employees there, en masse, monitoring production daily.
Worse, when a “perfect storm” does come together, it never lasts, either the bootleggers take over, the manufacturer sells out to a higher bidder with lower standards, or the quality tapers off as all parties try to cut costs.
Is it getting better? Maybe. Will it happen someday? People always say it will, but I wonder if a small-time western entrepreneur will ever find a reliable partner in China. Piaggio and Yamaha are already getting (relatively) decent bikes from China, but the small volume of American scooter sales will never compete with the volume Piaggio or Yamaha orders.
Chinese bikes will improve, but it won’t happen through small-time middlemen, it’ll happen when a couple Chinese manufacturers see the light and enact a long-term plan for a positive worldwide brand reputation, like Honda in the fifties or SYM today.