Ask them if stihl owns those companies or if they subcontract their cylinder work
Mao wanted to make China self sufficient as it had been before the West moved in to rape & pillage the country .
HE really did not know how to do it and favoured the collective.
Mao had the aim of a foundry in every village & a pushbike for every household to make China "modern"
His successors were a bit more savy than that and had a long look at how other countries had developed form pesent manual agriculture
Unlike Europe & the Americas, China actually learned from history rather than repeating it .
So from Saudi Arabia they took the philosophy of a 50:50 partnership between any foreign entity that wanted to set up a facility in China.
So while Stihl "ownes" their Chinese factories, they only own 1/2 of all of them.
This prevented the situation of the Phillipines where US businesses set up factories to make stuff to sell back to the USA thus making the population slaves in their own country exporting both the goods & the profits back to the USA ( they learned that from the British East India Co )
It also prevented the Indonesian / Malasia / Burmese situation where the colonial power pulls out and takes all of the technology & expertese with them so sets the country back 50+ years & leaves an unstable political mess behind .
So Stihl has a factory with Stihl on the street signs but they are in partnership with a local company.
Same story with Zama when they moved from Japan to Hong Kong then China mainland .
Where ever possible Chinese factories are fully intergrated so they will have their own foundry on site ( or next door ) feeding castings onto the assembly line as needed .
A system they took from the Japanese factories.
What we forget is for China most of the development was on green field sites so factories are mostly on large plots with room for expansion and space to have a foundry / machining shop / plastic moulding line all directly connected to the assembly line .
Thus the floor stock is virtually nill & the transport costs are virtually nill as the parts are made as needed to fed the line.
That cuts the actual production cost by over 50% ( note not materials cost ) , just the costs of putting the thing together .
The West tried to impliment Just In Time , shoehorned into small factories on unsuitable sites thus requiring lots of small warehouses all along to line with lots of storemen recieving the various parts for that days production .
About the only place that Western countries got JIT to work properly is beer & milk where the bottles / cans are made on site & fed int the filling line as needed .
