Moving production offshore to Hong Kong and Guangdong (1998)

Becoming the side that leaves

What the company lost to the strong yen of 1985 were orders — not technology, not equipment. Its customers’ factories had merely crossed the sea, and the board makers left in Japan found themselves standing where the work no longer reached. The 1998 move into Hong Kong and Guangdong is the answer to that experience, thirteen years in coming. Placing the trading and procurement window in Hong Kong, building the volume plant in Nansha, and waiting two years for it to run: the sequence has a weight quite unlike the lightness of leaving in pursuit of price alone.

What is interesting is that the same judgement was made twice. In 2007, just as Chinese production became the mainstay, Meiko set up its next company in Vietnam. The operating pattern established in Guangzhou — train local staff in Japan, then hand them the plant — was transferred as it stood to Hanoi. If what moves is the operating pattern rather than the equipment, then little is lost when a base shifts from China to Vietnam. That by the year ended March 2025 Meiko’s tangible fixed assets in Vietnam were 2.5 times those in China marks where that accumulation now stands.