The presence of Asian exhibitors in general, and Chinese companies in particular, was larger at InfoComm this year – not surprisingly, considering that the InfoComm China show in Beijing two months earlier was the organization’s biggest event there yet, with 10,758 visitors, an increase of 16 percent over the last show there in 2009…A decade ago, the lighting industry was using China and other Asian countries as their manufacturing resource…but that paradigm may be shifting. Troels Volver, formerly with Martin and more recently the export manager for Italy-based lighting manufacturer SGM, pointed out that his Chinese labor costs have increased 23 percent in the last year, which is fueling a surge in China’s nascent middle class and which will, ultimately, transform the country from an oasis of cheap manufacturing to an end consumer…but overseas lighting brands that have capitalized manufacturing ventures in China, in Volver’s view, may get “burned,” unless they “develop a domestic market for those same products in China or find new, more cost-effective manufacturing locations in the world, or both.”
—Dan Daley, from “The Biz,” PLSN, Aug. 2011
