The General Manager of the Tianjin Able Import and Export Trading Company (AIETC), Mr Stephen Ketu, said businessmen and women in Ghana and Africa complained a lot about being given a raw deal by their Chinese partners because they failed to start off with the particular dimensions, design or nature of the items they required to be supplied to them.

“If we give our specifications and insist on them, we would no longer speak of inferior quality of goods from China,” he said.

Mr Ketu shared these insights with some African journalists in China during an interaction on business between China and Africa.

Inferior goods

Touching on the myth of inferior goods and services from China to Africa, he stated that African traders and businessmen always complained about the goods supplied them because they started off their transactions with the price of the commodities and not with the quality.

“If you go to Russia, there are Chinese products there, if you go to the UK they have China products, US, Japan and Europe but none of the countries are complaining that China’s products are fake. Why is it that only Africa has a problem with Chinese products? he asked.

Mr Ketu said while many factors accounted for the lack of trust between Ghanaian, other African businesses and their Chinese counterparts, the main reason was because the African partners always focused on very low prices.

“Whatever price you give they will give you your quality. If you ask for very low prices, you will get very low quality because you cannot get quality goods with a lower amount of money and your suppliers would lower the quality to meet your demand,” he said.

Mr Ketu stated that the incidence of inferior or low quality goods also arose out of the greed of some African traders who would deliberately ask for low quality goods but price them as high quality goods for their customers.

Others also cannot distinguish between the different qualities of the goods they import and so ended up requesting goods that may not be of the quality required “and that is one of the things AIETC tries to help its clients with,” he said.

Bank transactions, standards

According to Mr Ketu who has been in the import and export business for 19 years, another snag in trade relations between China and Africa was that many businessmen and women in Africa preferred to do transactions online without having foreknowledge of the Chinese partners they were dealing with.

He stated that, that opened up the African businessmen and women to various dubious deals as some of the online contacts were fictitious and some websites or online contacts were just set up to dupe unsuspecting people.

“The people will just change their address or pull down their contact after you have transferred your money and you cannot find them. You cannot sit in Ghana or any African country and do business with somebody in China.

“You must first make contact with the people, find their location and check if they are duly recognised by the Chinese government and then you can do business with them,” Mr Ketu urged African businessmen and women.

He said some Chinese businesses do not have the license to export and their only chance was to ship goods to Africa because of the lack of enforcement of standards.

He also said inferior goods got into Africa because of the lack of standards or the enforcement of same if they existed, adding that goods exported to Europe were always of high quality because of the stringent enforcement of high standards and inspection of goods imported to meet those standards.

Another bone of contention between Chinese and African businessmen was the supply of different goods other than what was requested by African partners.

To curtail that, Mr Ketu advised the signing of a contract between both parties, spelling out the exact specifications, quantity, date of delivery, mode of payment, servicing and maintenance in the case of equipment and steps to take when there was a breach in contract and other very important details that would make transactions a win-win affair.

The Deputy General Manager of AIETC, Mr Ding Zhiqiang also took the journalists through the general services the company offered. The journalists were also shown the environmental and health wings of the Able group of companies, the Jinxinsheng Environmental and the Haoyisheng Group.