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| On Tuesday, Mattel recalled millions of toys made in China deemed dangerous to kids. David Zalubowski/AP |
Chinese toy recalls show need for stringent quality control
Recall puts focus on need for stringent quality control for imports.
By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the August 16, 2007 edition
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This week's recall of millions of toys from China isn't just kids' stuff. It is focusing fresh attention on whether corporations are doing enough to ensure product safety in an era of outsourced and globalized manufacturing.
Mattel is hardly a fly-by-night operation. It's the largest US toymaker and had measures in place for tracking and enforcing quality control. Unlike many toymakers, it actually owns and runs some of its own factories in China.
Yet as of Tuesday, 18 million Mattel toys from China are on recall, and many consumers are wondering, if it can happen on this scale with this company, who will it happen with next?
As concerns about safety have mounted this year, US-based toymakers have already been in damage-control mode. They have launched a range of preventive and defensive measures: redesigning products, relabeling, adding new layers of inspection. Despite all that, the recall problems could spell slower toy sales this holiday season.
China, too, faces a big public-relations challenge, since this week's events simply add to a tide of bad news about product safety.
But the low-cost economics of overseas production remain compelling for corporations. The question isn't whether to have a far-flung supply chain, but how to manage it.
"These supply chains are becoming much more sophisticated …. It's going to require new approaches" for quality control, says Eric Johnson, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. "The issue for multinationals operating there now is, how do you manage the supplier's supplier?"
The fact that Mattel ran into trouble, he says, hints at the difficulties facing any industry.
"I view them as one of the best" in the toy category, says Mr. Johnson. "They were in China long before China was cool in terms of low-cost sourcing," and run a number of their own facilities there.
Increasingly, it's not just product assembly that occurs in developing nations such as China, but the production of materials such as paint as well.
One aspect of Tuesday's recall involved a Mattel partner, which changed paint vendors and received pigment containing lead.
"While the painting subcontractor, HLD, was required to utilize paint supplied directly from [the company specified by Mattel], it instead violated Mattel's standards and utilized paint from a non-authorized, third-party supplier," Mattel said in its recall statement.
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