Shock,. Horror, Oh the shame of it.
I've finally found the answer to the question I'd been asking ARB for many years now...... Why are ARB Lockers cheaper in the US than here in Oz, where they are made?
Well folks, seems ARB has shipped it's locker manufacturing over seas. Go on guess where!!!!!!
That's right the good old US of A. And that is why they are cheaper there then over here, they are no longer an Australian made product, but an imported product. By the way, most ARB products are now manufacture overseas. But I guess we should have known that already. :-(
I think you will find that they have more than one manufacturing plant. Lots of their gear sold in Oz is made here, a fair bit of their gear sold elsewhere in the world is made at plants OS. I can't remember where it may have been Thailand or Korea or where ever but that is what we were told when we did a tour through the Kilsyth factory. Our tour was nearly 2 years ago I think and things may have changed but there were lots of different areas in the factory making different things. I can certainly remember the compressor assembly area and locker area, we saw lots of OEM toyota bars being made, we saw the area where lockers were developed and tested, there were racks and racks of broken axles, etc in there! Fridges were developed and tested on site there although manufacture was outsourced but done to their specs, pretty much the same as the toyota bars that were being manufactured by ARB and put into boxes printed with Toyota Genuine Parts all over them...
I think it is more the design and quality control of items that is an issue, not the place of manufacture. There are plenty of items that people deem "Top Quality" that are manufactured in plants in China, a country renowned for crap products but with the correct systems in place they can produce consistently good quality items. Look at Apple, Nikon, etc...
Previous posts are saying that companies need to get with the times, realise it is a global market, etc. Here we have a company that has done this, they certainly have a massive investment and employ hundreds of people in Australia and if it was economical to manufacture everything here and export around the world I am sure they would but we all know that the manufacturing industry in Oz isn't all that competitive. It sounds like some don't like their pricing but thankfully we are a free country and one of the things that means is that companies are allowed to be privately owned and are allowed to price things to what they want. Along with being a free country, no one is forced to buy their product... If their products are so massively over priced, why are there not so many other companies producing the same products with the same quality, the same backup and same availability at a heaps cheaper price?
Dave