Wrigley waits nearly two months before the shipment is released _ and frets the whole time about it aging.
But off the coast of Zhejiang province, a marine patrol seizes the ship besides 960,000 packs of gum, it turns out, the ship is loaded with smuggled cars. Shanghai is on China’s coast, so Wrigley decides to ship the gum by coastal freighter. It’s mixed with sugar and flavorings, stamped into sticks, packaged and loaded on a truck. At a factory in Guangzhou, just north of Hong Kong, huge machines stir an admixture of gum, glycerin and glucose into a heated goo. It starts out, like all Wrigley’s gum, as a large block of brown gum base. Zhang Xiaomei’s stick of Doublemint tells it all. Getting it to consumers before then is a journey fraught with peril. Otherwise, the gum dries out or the sugar bleeds through the packaging. Wrigley wants its gum consumed within eight months of manufacture. products lie jumbled and neglected in a dim display case alongside packages of dried mushrooms. Consider the Combos salty snacks at Beijing’s airport: Bags of the Mars Inc.
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Distributors are mainly state-owned and have little incentive, let alone understanding, of how to position a brand. computers to Chili Beer _ brewed in Cave Creek, Ariz., with a pepper in each bottle.įinding reliable distributors _ usually by word-of-mouth _ is the first challenge, but seldom the last. On the streets of Shanghai, bicycles and motorbikes deliver everything from Hewlett-Packard Co. Unlike neighboring Japan, where a rigid distribution system locks out many foreign goods, China is chaotic but pretty much wide open. ``Distribution is the biggest problem″ companies now face, says W.J. But in a land where roads are poor, rivers are jammed and railways are clogged, delivering the goods isn’t easy. And many of those people are ready and willing to buy Western products. Western goods can now reach about 200 million of China’s 1.2 billion people, more than double a few years ago. How well these companies do will help determine the scale of this potentially vast market. But mastering the arcane distribution maze is one of the great challenges of China’s economic revolution _ a puzzle just about every big consumer-products company in the world is now trying to solve. That’s something of a wonder, given the daunting scale and obstacles in the world’s largest developing country. To reach the flimsy blue plywood stand that serves this customer in pigtails, the minty stick traveled a thousand miles by truck, rusting freighter, tricycle cart and bicycle _ and is still freshly soft and sugardusted at the time it is sold. Outside a corner candy stand in Shanghai, 10-year-old Zhang Xiaomei folds a piece of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum into her mouth _ one of 400 million sticks Wm.
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