By Xinhua
Beijing : China-made goods remain a favourite with shoppers worldwide during the Christmas season despite a string of product recalls and negative media coverage in recent months.
Shoppers in the world’s major cities like New York, Paris, London and Toronto flock to stores, supermarkets and shopping centres to buy Chinese toys and other items in large quantities as the yearend shopping fever peaks.
Right before Christmas, US Today reported citing industry experts that sales of Chinese toys in the US were not affected by recent product recalls.
The competitive edge of Chinese products is a result of globalisation, leading to mutually beneficial results for China and the rest of the world as consumers worldwide get inexpensive and reliable products and China boosts its economy.
In a report published in 2005, Morgan Stanley Investment Bank said middle and low-income US consumers enjoyed many benefits from cheap imports from developing countries.
The bank estimated that buying inexpensive imports could have saved US consumers up to $600 billion in the last decade.
Bryan Ellis, chairman of Toy Industries Europe, said that European toy industries have confidence in the expertise of Chinese manufacturers after decades of cooperation between the two sides.
Industry experts also noted that many of the problems with Chinese toys were actually caused by bad designs and problems of this kind had to be addressed through cooperation between Chinese manufacturers and international toy makers.
Mattel Toy co., an American toy maker badly hit by repeated product recalls this year, acknowledged in September that the majority of its recalled toys had problems caused by the bad designs provided by the company itself.
To maintain business confidence, the Chinese government has decided to tighten controls over home manufacturers while working with major trading partners like the United States, the European Union and Japan to make sure that substandard Chinese goods stay out of the international market.