And I'm duly impressed. Sorry to say, perhaps, because part of me (I admit) hoped to see dirty disorganized facilities completely incapable of satisfying the tooling or other needs of U.S. stampers-or all stampers for that matter, no matter where they reside on this planet. Instead, during a recent week-long trip to the southern-China city of Shenzhen with a PMA study mission of 23 metal-stamping company officials from 20 different companies in the United States and Canada, I came away with practically nothing but good things to say about how the several Chinese metalforming companies we visited go about their business. Now, before we get all hyped up over why PMA sponsors such missions or whether it should, and how it's perhaps near-blasphemous to do so, let me first say that I'm quite sure that every American company either doing business in some way in China, or soon planning to, is not exactly celebrating that fact. Rather, every attendee on the PMA trip expressed a simple fact of life: You must at least investigate and evaluate doing business in China or possibly face a huge competitive disadvantage. Most on the trip simply stated that their interests in China stem from basic survival instincts. The often-repeated theme: Conduct some level of business in China-whether it is purchasing tools and/ or partnering to supply a stamping customer already operating in China-in order to keep the doors open and the presses running in North American facilities.
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