Strictly supervised beer
As you can see, this Suntory fine malt beer has been ‘strictly supervised’ by Suntory. That’s right, not made, supervised.
Many companies have taken advantage of China’s low labor costs to set up factories here, and Japan is one of the biggest takers. Suntory has a huge factory here for beer production, but it is sold within China rather than re-exported back to Japan.
Like many factories set-up before it was possible for foreigners to own more than half of an enterprise, a local Chinese firm controls 51%, meaning that Suntory’s role has been reduced to providing recipes and ‘supervising’ the final process.
This post was imported from my Tumblr, which I used for blogging between 2014 and 2015.
