Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Pleyels future?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivec...rite-piano-factory-plays-its-final-chord

Interesting article about Pleyel's ultimate end coming soon. I kind of like them for the few I have tuned over the years but these words I quote out of the article...

...The key to success, he says, is selling pianos for the low market as well as the high. To do that, you cannot make your piano entirely in France, as Pleyel was doing.

"Actually, we need to work with China, because we don't work with only rich people," Colin says. "We have to sell pianos to people who don't have a lot of money.

"If we make the piano only in France, the price will be more than double. You have to use China to help you make the piano, but you keep the French know-how."...

Can a whole company be saved by selling part of it out to a cheap labour market? I would say yes, because its been done before, but maybe there still remains the question of... should it be done?

I used to work for one European piano company, whose pianos were made in China, and "finally regulated and voiced in their company by the finest European technicians". That is what they were telling the customers in their advertisements. Really, over 50% of pianos were delivered to their dealers directly from Chinese factory, and sold with the minimum of preparation. The dealers had a lot of complaints coming from the customers later. The other aspect of the problem is that it can be very dangerous for the economies of the more developed states to move a large part of their production to China, because they could become very dependent in that case.