Made in Europe
Singapore 19th July 2011
I have touched on the origin of (lighting) products several times in my blogs. My thought today is triggered by a current story running in the news at the moment about a Singapore furniture retailer with its high end clientele through out the asia pacific region. The retailer apparently sells high end furniture judging from interviews with clients who claim having bought a $70,000 sofa and the like…what? I buy 2 decent cars for that amount! Anyhow the row has erupted over claims that the so called italian imported furniture was actually made in China. The twist being that it went “swimming” overseas first before it was re-imported back into China for about 10 times the price. Not sure how it was discovered but someone who paid big bucks for some furniture started to doubt its quality and w launched a complaint. Test then showed it was not the quality wood it was sold for, even worse it was found to have originated from a chinese factory. The credibility of the furniture company now of course has taken a very serious beating.
In lighting you can be sure the same happens. This world is a world revolving around money and greed and certainly in this region there are nearly daily stories to support that. The worst story I came across in my own projects many years back is a supplier who quoted for the lighting with the original specification (made in europe) but was later found out to deliver on site a local copy. It is one thing to substitute a light fitting with an “alternative” but it is another thing to have the substitute pass off as the original!! At
least pass on the savings to the client! I off course never worked with this supplier again.
This does not help the “china made” stigma when these things happens which is a shame as there is actually a lot of good products being manufactured in this region, China included. In fact many of the lighting products sold in europe are actually made in china under strict quality control!
In Light Watch today the other big renewable energy technology litterally taking a big flight too, the wind turbines. In my own native Holland a big wind turbine park is being built in the windy North Sea and collaborations between neighboring European
countries in the area look at building megawatt windturbine parks in the North Sea. Target is to get about 20% of the energy needs from wind energy by 2020!
Light Watch 125: Wind turbines in the North Sea
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