Andrew Cook is right (Letters, 13 December), Japanese policy is worse for us than cheap Chinese manufactured goods. Those Hitachi trains are hi-tech products and Japanese companies have a policy that no risk will be taken with manufacturing abroad, hence all components must come from Japan. My company, EI Tec GmbH, designs, manufactures, installs and commissions industrial exhaust gas cleaning systems. When installing in the UK, for instance, we use local labour, local steel manufacturing, locally supplied components. Only key equipment, software, one supervision and thereafter one commission engineer is sent. For us to quote in Japan is “no way”. And, for EI Tec to quote pollution control units for new Japanese factories being built in Europe, the same story; the Japanese only allow suppliers to quote who have sold to them in Japan already. In fact, they install exact copies of Japanese factories. This is politics and this is also where government lobbying should step in. This concerns all established tech companies in European countries like Germany and UK.
Bert Wynbelt
Solignac, France
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