COVER FEATURE SYENTOR
were allowed and lots of people there wanted us to form joint ventures with them. I had various discussions, but we decided that with a joint venture we could not get the quality control and the consistency that we wanted.” The situation changed dramatically, however,
when the prospect of a wholly owned venture began to appear possible, with the acquisition of a factory in Taixing, north of the Yangtze river and just a couple of hundred kilometres from Shanghai. There, Doughty knew, was a skilled workforce and just the environment Stentor needed. But first, he had to persuade the Chinese authorities to allow him to establish what was one of the very first WFOEs. “Days of meetings and several visits followed, but in 1995 we eventually achieved the opening of our wholly owned subsidiary there – a 100 per cent Stentor factory.”
AGAINST THE GRAIN If the Chinese authorities had taken some persuasion, advisors back home were just as cautious, as Doughty found when he called on the services of one of London’s largest legal firms to advise him. Their advice was succinct – don’t do it.
instruments, which it would mostly sell to the trade. It’s worth recalling that imports were restricted in the 1940s and 50s, but as those impediments slowly fell away, Stentor began to stretch its wings. “It really began to build-up during the
1960s,” Doughty recalls “Every year, I would visit the Frankfurt fair – I think my first was in 1962 – and we were then importing a lot of violins and other instruments, mostly from Europe. We were also importing a lot of guitars at the time – in fact at one point, Stentor sold one in four of all the acoustic guitars sold in the UK and we still sell many tens of thousands of guitars, today.”
LOOKING EAST During the 60s and 70s, the major source of stringed instruments was from behind the Iron Curtain, where traditional manufacturing had survived and labour rates were cheap. Japan had not fully opened for business and China was still slumbering, but Doughty could see the writing on the wall in Europe and had already been doing business in China since the 1960s. “It was always done via third parties in those
days and even on occasions, though we didn’t do it directly, it was done on barter trade. But that’s what it was like then. Business, as I’ve realised after a lifetime, is changing all the time – it never stops and you’ve got to keep up with it. That’s the biggest thing that people don’t realise. We’re in a very traditional business and certainly the marketing and image of Stentor is that, but we have to keep right up to date because business changes all the time.” From the early days, when trade with China
was done via correspondence alone, relations began to warm and Doughty made his first visit in 1978. “I got the first visa that the Chinese issued
to anybody in the world to visit a consumer goods factory and I’m quite proud of that. In fact it resulted in a full-page article in the
26 miPRO DECEMBER 2010
Sunday Times. We’ve had a lot of firsts like that. In fact KPMG did a case study on the company at one stage as we were the first SME in the world to get permission from the Chinese government to open what’s known as a ‘WFOE’ – a wholly foreign owned enterprise.” What had made him so certain that
operating in China was worth the risk? “From that first visit, I went again every
year, visiting most of the major cities in China where there was any violin or guitar making taking place. They were all state factories in those days – everything belonged to the state, so I bought from the China National Light Industrial Products Import and Export Corporation. “By the early 1980s I was visiting all the
principle places and I was becoming well known there. The first American companies arrived about then and were amazed to find that the Chinese already knew me. “By as early as 1975 I had managed to
persuade one of the government committees that they would make the Stentor student violin under our own name. Before that, you could only buy instruments like ‘Larks’, ‘Skylarks’ and ‘Blessings’. So then we could brand instruments under our own name, we could set the specification and we could even ship out European parts. But it was always a case of three steps forward and two steps back – or even worse. There were quality problems, people would be moved for no reason and suddenly I would find myself dealing with people who simply didn’t understand what I was talking about. “But we still made progress and established Stentor as a force in China and then, under Deng Xiaoping, the changes began in China. At the time, I was having Stentor models made in three different locations. At first a few joint ventures
Doughty with the wood stock at his Chinese facility
“I thanked him for his advice and said we needed to do this because if we didn’t, in five years time we’d have lost a lot of our advantages in the market.” Doughty went ahead, hired six managers with whom he had previously worked and set about building his manufacturing base in Taixing. Designs and jigs were prepared in the UK and a process of regular visits began that continues today, with not just Doughty, but also his wife, Bridget, son, Luke, and co-director Robert Bogin, all
heavily involved in the operation. Taixing continues to grow – recently with
the adoption of some automation – though much of the work is still undertaken by hand. If images of Asian sweatshops spring to mind
whenever Chinese production is mentioned, life in the Stentor factory gives the lie to that and the evidence is freely available, because Doughty, showing that customary flair once again, commissioned a video some few years ago, which is available from Stentor and shows in some detail the hand manufacturing of instruments – utilising
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