T3: Made In Vietnam

Metallurgy

The news of TakaraTomy shifting their production facilities to Vietnam in search of lower production costs had surfaced several months ago. I am unable to find any follow-up on the progress but I am certainly looking forward to the very first Made In Vietnam model

I was at the local departmental store recently and was informed that the price of a Regular Box is going to increase again! Surely this deviates from the purpose of shifting the production plants across the East China Sea?


Article Date: 27 March 2008

TakaraTomy plans to fully shift production of its mainstay Tomica miniature cars to Vietnam from China in the year to March 2011, company officials said Tuesday. The company will spend some 500,000 dollars to install Tomica manufacturing facilities at its plant in Haiphong, northern Vietnam.

Initially, the Haiphong plant will make annually 2-3 million Tomica cars from September this year. But the miniature car series will be entirely produced at the Vietnamese foothold three years later, when annual output there will be raised to 15 million units, the officials said.

TakaraTomy once had considered raising Tomica prices in order to cope with soaring labor costs in China. But it managed to avoid the price hike by transferring production to Vietnam, where the costs are less than half that of China, they said. The company intends to study the possibility of shifting production from China of other products, such as "Plarail" toy trains and "Choro-Q" miniature cars.

It plans to transfer about 30 percent of overall toy production in China to Vietnam three years after the initial move. About 90 percent of the company's toys are made in China at present.

[Source: SupplyChain]