Downsides to Outsourcing Manufacturing Overseas
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
While many global ag companies have moved their manufacturing to cheaper countries, that decision may not always be the most efficient choice. Gallagher Animal Management chief executive Lisbeth Jacobs says they have actually brought most of the manufacturing in house including countries like New Zealand, Australia and the US.
Jacobs… “When we acquired Adjacent, that company was making their knit bands in China, and they were setting up a manufacturing site in Thailand. We took over the Adjacent's technology, and the first thing that I did was actually close down the manufacturing in China. The Chinese are very, very well-versed in reverse engineering and in copying and good on them, but I don't want my product to be one of those. So we shut down the manufacturing in China. We actually shut down the onboarding of the Thai manufacturing plant. So we pulled all of that manufacturing back into Hamilton. And that was the key differentiator because suddenly our redesign cycles were a lot shorter because we have our R and D people in Australia, New Zealand. We have our product development people here. The people who translate that into manufacturing are here. As soon as we see something needs to be tweaked, we tweak it. If you work with manufacturing offshore, you need to send things, it takes five weeks, it needs to come back. You know, by the time you're in your second development cycle, you're two months down the track. We don't have that issue. We control it end to end.”
Gallagher is known throughout 100+ countries and still remains family-owned.