Because the idea that China can’t even make a pen right is inherently funny.
We don’t usually give ballpoint pens much thought. They’re cheap, commonplace, and disposable. But ballpoint pens are actually a fairly difficult thing to produce. Or at least the ball bearings at the end are.
The balls have to be made of a very specific kind of steel, with a very specific radius, and they have to be perfectly round. It doesn’t sound hard, but there is basically no room for error. Even the tinniest mistake means that the pen just doesn’t work.
And until 2017 China, despite producing many ballpoint pens, could not produce the balls domestically. They couldn’t get the right kind of steel. Couldn’t get tools precise enough to work it. Couldn’t even get the right kind of cast iron to make the right kind of tools to make the balls.
On the surface it’s an absurd scenario. How can a nation that builds iPhones be unable to make the little steel balls that go in pens? But once you dig deeper it’s a sobering reminder of how much industries build on each other.
China only industrialized in the 1950s, 70 years ago. Which sounds like a long time ago but it really isn’t. They had to play “catch up” with the world. And while they can do the big things well enough, they don’t have the institutional knowledge to do the small things we take for granted.
The ballpoint pens, as hilarious as they are, are just the tip of the iceberg. Chinese Industries struggle with anything that requires a high level of precision, because historically they’ve been able to import those components from overseas.
And that’s not a problem you can fix overnight.
A Simple ball point pen should be very easy right?
Nopes
The Metallurgy required is finer than the one for a F – 22 Raptor
Yes. I don’t exaggerate
You need a certain degree of fine steel and you need a thin bore with an error rate of no more than 30 nanometres
Can it be done?
Oh absolutely. Any Country with a sufficient metallurgy base can do it
If it then needs to sell the Ballpoint pen for $ 39 on the retail market to break even
Yep
The US estimated that it would retail ball point pens for THIRTY NINE DOLLARS if it made the pen tips at home, Stateside
That’s the problem – Sheer cost efficiency
China achieved this by spending a whopping 590 Billion Yuan ($ 100 Billion)
For Six years from 2011–2017, China made at least 30 Billion Tips of low quality and kept on making more attempts based on the Swiss Patent
In 2014 they managed to achieve 668% of the target manufacturing price (13.36 Yuan instead of 2 Yuan)
In 2017 they cracked the 2 Yuan production cost with Swiss Patents
In 2019 they cracked the Local Design and became the fifth country to patent a ball point pen tip design after US, France, Switzerland and Japan
In 2023 they can make ball point tips for 0.48 Yuan (0.07 Cents) against Japanese (3.6 Cents) or the Swiss (9 Cents)
That’s the secret to Chinas manufacturing prowess
They build millions and millions of worthless and inefficient products using huge subsidies from the Government
They keep producing and destroying all these worthless inefficient products
Slowly due to the sheer scale of production, they manage to move from worthless and inefficient to physically viable and finally commercially viable
Then once they have hit the ‘Commercially Viable’ stage, they have enough know how and the base technology to create high quality comparable to Global Standards
Then they create their own supply chain and local equipment and local patents to keep the money within China – A HUB
Finally they create a scale of fine quality products at LOWEST COST ON EARTH
The Competition gets SHATTERED
Many Idiots call this Stealing and Reverse Engineering
It’s not
It’s just the Chinese way of perfecting themselves
Like I told you how Deng ordered more than 10,000 companies to keep making Picture Tubes and destroying them after they were made because they were of low quality
And the final end product of that was SHENZHEN.
