Over 38 years, Changhua-based toy company Tung Chang Arts and Crafts has made more than 100 million bamboo-copters for the Japanese market.
Company owner Chen Chien-hung (陳健宏) said he originally focused on making bamboo coasters for Japan, but he was unhappy with the amount of wasted bamboo shavings and decided branch out to making bamboo-copters from leftover materials.
“The product was more successful than I expected. Our highest annual production on record is 8.6 million toys, with 90 percent of them exported to Japan,” he said.
Photo: Liu Hsiao-hsin, Taipei Times
Chen said the orders from overseas nearly exceed production capacity, and he boosted efficiency by developing his own semi-automated machines that were optimized for the cottage industry contractors he relied on.
“The key to a good bamboo-copter that can fly high and far is cutting the angle of the aerodynamic surface right. The precise cut is made using a semi-automated machine to standardize the product and guarantee the level of quality that Japanese customers expect,” he said.
Retails prices for the bamboo-copters have increased from NT$0.7 each to between NT$5 and NT$6, Chen said adding that the trade remains a semi-automated industry because full automation is unsuitable for manufacturing quality toys from bamboo.
“To maintain quality, subcontracting family producers of the toys continues to be the mainstay of my business,” Chen said, adding that one of his best subcontractors is a septuagenarian grandmother who first started working for him 30 years ago and is still making the toys by hand.
In the 1990s, Chen’s orders declined, mainly because Chinese manufacturing was pricing him out of the Japanese market.
However, the company has bounced back as Chinese workers wages have increased significantly and thinned profit margins for Chinese manufacturers, who responded by reducing their bamboo-copter production, he said.
The company again has large orders to fill, Chen said.
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