Good morning. It’s easy to assume China must have been crippled by the U.S. trade battle that reached a temporary truce when President Trump and President Xi met in October. But China’s trade surplus is at a record high of $1.08 trillion in the first 11 months of this year. Some of that is due to China doubling down on other markets: overall exports were up 6% in November over the previous year, even though exports to the U.S. were down 29%.
But part of it reflects the fact that U.S. companies didn’t go away. I recently spoke with Stephan Tanda, CEO of AptarGroup, a $3.7 billion-a-year manufacturer of specialized packaging and delivery systems for pharma, beauty, and consumer companies, based in Crystal Lake, Illinois. He points out that China remains a key manufacturing hub with longstanding infrastructure and relationships that are central to the company’s regional supply chain. What’s more, he says the speed to market is an advantage that’s hard to replicate in their other innovation centers around the world.
“The amount of grit and sheer willpower is on a different scale,” said Tanda, noting that he now leverages Chinese talent to help his European plants develop product prototypes in six weeks vs. up to 18 months. “We need the China ecosystem to create the pilot mold. We may still want something made in France for luxury beauty products but a lot of innovation used to be China [producing] for China and now it’s China for the region, China for the world.”
Tanda does have the advantage that his products are not considered sensitive from a national defense perspective—”essential items but, yes, there’s not going to be a war waged over them”—and he echoes his U.S. peers in focusing much of his production on local needs, with more than half of his customer base for Chinese-made products coming from China. “It used to be you’d want the Western luxury brand but now you buy the Chinese brand because it’s just as good or better … It helps that we’ve been an early leader in automating our core processes and it’s much easier with AI.”
Added Tanda: “China is more capitalistic than any other country that I know in terms of real drive, hustling, making things work, iterating. For companies doing business, that’s what you compete with. And that means you become a much more competitive actor yourself to be successful in that environment. It helps us to stay sharp and get more competitive because if we can do it there, we can also learn it here.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.