By Stu MacKay: MacKay & Company
Replacement truck parts and components manufactured in foreign countries and shipped into the North American heavy-duty aftermarket is an issue of genuine concern. How in the world can we permit interlopers from Asia and elsewhere to copy and produce our parts for our distribution and our customers? Don’t the folks running trucks, trailers and buses today care that this stuff may not be up to snuff? We know how prudently they specify our components when putting together a new truck order, some of them right down to the last lug nut. Don’t they care about where the replacement stuff comes from, too?
Would you like the bad news sugar-coated – or would you prefer it straight? Sugar-coating just doesn’t set well with me, so let’s go at it directly: Most of your customers don’t care where these parts come from, as long as they work. Period. Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s look at the facts.
A study conducted by MacKay & Company involving approximately 1,000 operators and maintainers of medium-duty trucks, tractors and trailers asked about their attitude toward parts manufactured outside the United States. In retrospect, we probably should have changed “the United States” to “North America.” I hope our friends in Canada and Mexico won’t be offended; we certainly weren’t singling them out.
Here’s what your customers said:
As you might suspect, the largest fleets, those with more than 500 power units, were somewhat more encouraging; 34 percent of them would not use imported parts. The bad news? 66 percent said they would.
Let’s look at it another way. Suppose these foreign parts were brought into this market, not with some odd-sounding offshore name, but private labeled, perhaps for a distribution organization, perhaps for a component supplier, perhaps for an OEM. Then what?
