Foreign Trade
Three hundred years, and the centre of world trade has changed hands several times.
Steam power plus ocean routes sold goods to the world and built the empire on which the sun never set.
Repealed the Corn Laws — the first country to make free trade national policy.
After the war, the dollar system plus Coca-Cola and Hollywood took the global market.
“Made in Japan” swept the world; overseas earnings once matched the domestic market.
South Korea, Taiwan (China), Hong Kong (China) and Singapore took off on export processing.
Became the world’s factory; trade volume grew more than tenfold in twenty years.
From contract manufacturing and cross-border e-commerce towards our own brands and channels.
Why Export
It isn’t that your product is bad — it’s that too many people are squeezed into the same pond.
China is the world’s largest factory and most industries run on overcapacity. Three workshops on the same street make the same product, and whoever quotes lowest takes the order. There is no lowest price — only lower.
Above you, the leading brands have channels, capital and pricing power. Below you, small workshops carry no team, no social insurance, and will quote down to cost. In between sit the companies with real factories, real staff and proper certifications — the highest cost base, and the least room to move on price.
Ninety-day terms are normal domestically; six months is not unusual. The goods leave the gate and the money stays on someone else’s books. If they hit a cash-flow wall, that becomes a bad debt, and a year of profit can sit in one or two orders.
Raw materials, labour, environmental compliance, social insurance — more regulated every year, and more expensive every year. The price your client pays goes the other way. Squeezed from both ends, the margin disappears.
Same design, same photos, same pitch. Why should a customer pay you one cent more? Eventually the only lever is a discount, and the discount eats the profit.
Domestic demand has cooled. A wrong order used to be covered by the next one; now one wrong order can wipe out a year. So you don’t dare invest in equipment, expand capacity or hire — and the less you move, the more stuck you are.
Words that get used loosely — here is how we use them.