Curt Stoelting, the chief executive of RC2, concedes that the links in the Thomas & Friends supply chain broke down as it crossed the ocean. Since the toy manufacturer based in Oak Brook, Illinois, discovered lead paint on a Thomas train in April, RC2 has tried to strengthen its safety safeguards in China, Stoelting said last week in his first interview since last month's recall.
"We've always required our suppliers to follow our safety specifications," Stoelting said. "In this incident, those requirements were not met."
He said RC2 fired both the vendor who made the lead paint and the company that made the wooden toys.
Unlike Mattel, RC2 does not own any of its factories. Instead -- like many US toy makers operating in China -- it works with a network of contract manufacturers, supplemented by 175 RC2 employees stationed there.
RC2 officials would not provide the names of the paint maker and contract manufacturer responsible for the lead paint problem, but when asked whether those companies would be paying damages to RC2, Stoelting said the company was evaluating its options.
About 40 percent of the 1.5 million toys that were recalled last month had been returned as of July 11. RC2 is mailing customers new toys and reimbursing their postage.
HIT Entertainment, the owner of the Thomas brand, has not canceled its deal with RC2, nor have other media companies that let RC2 make toys based on their characters, Stoelting said. (Thomas & Friends is a popular TV program shown around the world.)
"We're still moving forward with our Thomas product lines," he said. "Our goal is to use this incident to really improve our procedures, improve our safeguards."
Stoelting said that RC2 was now requiring lead testing of every batch of paint used on the Thomas toys. And the company has increased the number of times it checks incoming supplies and outgoing toys for problems.
The company is also hiring an independent auditor to conduct checks, though RC2 executives have not decided whether to release the auditor's reports to the public, Stoelting said.
Executives at the Toy Industry Association's toy safety conference in Guangzhou, China, last week said that RC2 had also tried to join the group since its recall.
"We'd like to help them, frankly, if they'd accept our help," said Carter Keithley, president of the association.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
RSS