Despite production elsewhere, ‘Made in Japan’ still makes sense
Nowadays, in the face of offshore production ‘Made in Japan’ is commonly associated with Japanese consumers (and many Westerners as well) with high-quality merchandise. Aside from the marketing advantage, however, in many cases domestic production in Japan still makes good business sense for technology products, Asahi Shimbun reports. This has been the experience of Hewlett Packard, largely due to failure rate: computers often develop problems when put through the rigors of shipping long distances, and HP has been able to cut the failure rate in half by switching to domestic production for the Japanese market. Greater ease of parts inventory management is also cited as an advantage.
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