While many American manufacturers look to China as a place to make their products with cheap labor, an odd turnabout is taking place in this small town northeast of Columbia.
There, one of China's best-known companies, the Haier Group, is churning out refrigerators at a factory staffed by American workers.
The decision to build in South Carolina was a step toward the company's goal of making Haier a household name in America, like Whirlpool or Maytag. Haier argues that the plant saves transportation costs.
To the company, which had US$8.5 billion in revenue last year, the plant is at the core of its vision to expand in the US. The factory, completed in 2000 at a cost of US$40 million, is designed to respond nimbly to American retailers, who stock little inventory but want to replenish supplies quickly when products run out, said David Parks, a senior vice president of Haier's American unit. Shipping refrigerators from Asia can take up to six weeks.
"The factory makes perfect sense," Parks said. "When you ship refrigerators, you ship a lot of air, and shipping air is expensive."
But the factory is about far more than saving money on refrigerators. It is an expression of nationalist pride and of the Chinese government's determination to expand overseas in markets that it considers prestigious.
The government's objective is to catapult at least 50 Chinese companies onto the Fortune Global 500 list, according to its official media, up from the current 11. Haier is not on the Fortune list, which ranks the world's largest companies, but has been picked by the government to make the leap.
So far, the opening of the South Carolina factory has brought Zhang Ruimin, the company's chief executive, a flood of glowing coverage in the Chinese news media.
Zhang has sometimes called himself the Jack Welch of China. Last year, he was admitted into the Communist Party's elite ruling club, the Central Committee. The story of his success at turning an anemic state-owned factory into an appliance giant with overseas sales has been made into a movie.
Many Chinese have become more enamored with corporate executives than revolutionaries, so Zhang is something of a national hero. In that context, the opening of Haier's American factory is as much a cultural victory as a business one. To gain market share from Whirlpool and Maytag on their own turf, however, may be tough.
"In this industry, people buy on the price and the name recognition," said Diane Ritchey, the editor of Appliance, a trade magazine. "Everybody knows Maytag or Whirlpool or Frigidaire. People are going to buy what their mothers or grandmothers used.
"Some people cannot even pronounce their name," Ritchey said of Haier. "How comfortable are you going to be to have something in your home when you cannot pronounce its brand?"
The name is pronounced "higher."
Haier, partially owned by the government of the northern city of Qingdao, where it is based, has made some headway in small American market niches. It had a third of the market for compact refrigerators last year, three years after it began selling them here, and it captured half the market for refrigerated wine cabinets in about a year, according to a report by McKinsey, the management consulting firm.
Those products, often selling for a third less than those of competitors, can be found in Target, Wal-Mart, Costco and Best Buy stores.
But the company has set its sights higher. It wants 10 percent of the US market for standard-sized refrigerators by 2005, Parks said. Last year, it sold about 100,000 of them, or 2 percent of the total. Consumers have found them to be generally reliable, and they are cheaper than similar refrigerators selling under American brand names. Steven Duthie, a spokesman for Whirlpool, called Haier "a still very minor player" and its popular compact refrigerators "tiny little" appliances that are not much of a threat in the broader refrigerator market.
In Camden, a quiet town of 6,000, the boxlike, squeaky-clean factory among the hayfields provides 200 much-needed jobs, as several American manufacturers have shrunk or closed plants in the area. Cultural clashes are few because almost every employee at the factory is American.
Inside the plant, the presence of the Chinese company is felt in dozens of slogans, written in both Chinese and English, on banners hanging from the ceilings. "Never Say No to the Market," one says.
Allan Guberski, the general manager, has decided to let the occasional misspelled English words stay on the banners to retain their Chinese flavor. Managers decorate their offices with at least one award certificate issued and signed by Zhang.
Haier pays most of its American machine operators a little more than US$10 an hour, 10 times what it pays in China, along with healthcare benefits.
Donna Fortner, whose family has lived in Camden for generations, came to work for the Haier plant three years ago after she was laid off by a nearby truck maker.
At the beginning, Fortner worked with some Chinese technicians, who all returned home a few months ago.
Although she couldn't understand the accented English some of them spoke, they managed to teach her how to operate the machinery by simply showing her. When one of her three children needed to do school projects on foreign countries, she collected the Chinese newspapers that wrapped spare machinery parts and asked her Chinese mentors to translate the articles.
When the factory was opening, Gerald Reeves, the human res-ources director, led a team of 10 workers to visit the headquarters in Qingdao, which is known for its sea breezes.
Besides finding fermented Chin-ese eggs inedible, he was impressed by how disciplined Chinese workers are.
"When they had their end-of-day group meetings, they stood in nice straight lines," Reeves said. "I'll never get my people to stand in lines like that."
For Guberski, the plant manager, the discovery on the trip was the "strategic business unit" approach to management, widely used at the Haier plants in Qingdao. This approach turns each worker into an independent unit, rewarded for inventing ways to save the company money and punished for wasting its resources.
"I want the workers to know that their jobs each day are to contribute enough to the business to pay their own salaries," Guberski said.
He is still seeking an acceptable way to put the system in place, because labor laws in the two countries are different.
"Here, for example, you cannot have somebody work overtime and not pay him," he said.
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