Not to mention that, if the country they outsource to just simply steals their product, they’re out of business entirely.
The thinking is to get profits up the next few quarters, pocket their stock options, and move on before the theft of trade secrets becomes obvious.
A major problem with outsourcing to China is that you provide the product designs, assembly instructions, tooling requirements to them to build your product. They build it for a while and often hand off the whole production package to someone else to make for a lower price, since they aren’t paying you the royalties or profits, to the same customer list and distributors to whom they sold it previously on your behalf.
You get cheap production for a little while, and then you get a competitor who already has a business relationship with your customers.
D!psh!t [censored]s.
No cheers, unfortunately.
I have seen my own designs come from the other side of the earth, with someone else’s name on them. Saw this as early as 1989. We dismantled counterfeit devices, in detective mode. It was clear the counterfeiters had not reversed our design. They were handed our design.
I believe high level management’s private motivations/greed was at play in some of these shady technology transfers.