Toy maker in dead end after recalls
Updated: 2007-09-25 21:22
A senior official with the European retail giant Carrefour on Tuesday called upon foreign media to stop exaggerating quality problems of made-in-China products, claiming that such reports would not affect Carrefour's purchase in China.
Jean-Luc Chereau, advisor to the chairman of the management board of the Carrefour Group and president of the Carrefour (China) Foundation for Food Safety, told a symposium held in southwest China's Sichuan Province that more than 95 percent of goods sold in Carrefour's Chinese outlets come from local suppliers, and 99 percent of them are up to safety and quality standards.
"When a case of substandard products occurred in China, media coverage on the case often led to an impression that all Chinese products had problems, which could not reflect the whole situation and should be contained," said Chereau.
He said he is happy to see the Chinese government's awareness of the significance of quality control and the efforts it has made.
"China has already improved the quality of its products by a great deal," said Chereau.
Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel's executive vice-president for worldwide operations, made an apology to China's product safety chief Li Changjiang on Friday, saying Mattel "takes full responsibility" for three recalls it ordered this summer and "vast majority of its toys were recalled as a result of design flaws rather than manufacturing errors by Chinese manufacturers."
Mattel said it understood the result of the recalls that had caused for the reputation of Chinese manufacturers.
More than 300 Chinese toy makers have had their business licenses suspended or revoked in a national quality overhaul, said Li Changjiang, director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
China, the world's largest toy exporter, has been paying great attention to safety and quality of toy products, according to officials with CTA and China Chamber of Commerce for Imports and Exports of Light Industrial Products and Arts-Crafts (CCCLA).
The two organizations have pledged to strengthen quality inspection over Chinese goods along with foreign toy makers and importers and push domestic enterprises to improve self-supervision.
Soon after Mattel's first recall, many Chinese toy exporters and CCCLA jointly called on domestic toy producers to reject product orders beyond their production capacity or without explicit quality standards, and maintain strict quality tests of purchasing, production and sales.
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