They’re quality is a shit. I bought a wave+, broke within a couple months (spring in pliers broke making pliers unusable). Send it back and they say it’s not repairable so they give me a different one (mine was laser engraved). Then the replacement breaks (spring that holds pocket clip in place). I don’t even use the Leatherman that much.
That’s not exactly nationalism.
Whether you call it “third world” or “developing” the fact is that nations without the resources to hire and train skilled workers and purchase and develop high-quality machinery will generally be limited in their ability to produce high-quality products.
I mean, not even just that; companies don’t move manufacturing overseas to build a better product. There are plenty of product segments and individual products that demonstrate China and Taiwan are more than capable of producing high quality stuff with good QA, but no one moves manufacturing there to make high quality stuff, they do it because moving to a place with poor labor laws, cheap labor, with low expectations of health & saftey in the workplace, and weak environmental regulatory oversight is a unchecked-capitalism wet dream, and allows for more “competitive pricing” (a race to the bottom), and better profit margins.
Companies don’t move or start manufacturing overseas because they wanna build a good product, they do it cause it’s cheap as shit, and that’s reflected in a lot of what we associate with things being made poorly made. The manufacturing groups set up in other contries are perfectly capable of hitting QC goals, but it’s not like the folks doing business with them are generally asking for much with respect to product quality standards.
that’s a big part of how I look at it anyway
And the countries you mentioned can produce quality products if the company ordering the products cares enough to demand it and reject anything substandard.
See Apple. But you better believe they have QC experts at every level and if the suppliers don’t deliver they’ll never see another dime from Apple.