The United States imported more than four times as many goods from China as we exported there last year.
But our trade imbalance with China has gone the other way when it comes to professional services. Professional services, including architecture, constitute roughly a third of America’s exports, according to Architect Magazine, which notes many major American architecture firms now have offices in the largest Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, as well as second-tier cities like Tianjin.
However, if you’re one of those design firms and you’re specifying metal roofs in Asia, beware! The quality of metal roofing coil and the roll forming machines made there are often greatly inferior to coil and machines made in the U.S. and in Western Europe.
Our in-house machine expert, Mike Gorski, has had the opportunity to visit other continents and see the different roll forming equipment made in places like China, the Middle East and Africa. Mike’s take? Most of these machines are poorly made and have a life expectancy of only a few years. And Mike emphasizes there is little or no training for operators and no machine service support in these markets to fix a faltering machine. Consequently, the result often is a poorly made panel on a faulty machine.
So if you’re specifying a certain metal roofing profile for a building in China, insist that the general contractor pay special attention to whether the roofer is forming panels on a well-made Western roll former run by a trained crew of roofers. Otherwise, in a few short years, your building’s owner may have issues with leakage, rust, cinching and a host of other problems associated with poorly made machines turning out inferior metal roofing panels.
Ironically, this very problem has driven our company and other Western manufacturers to start servicing international roofing and gutter machine customers who have stopped purchasing equipment in their home countries. Good metal roofing contractors who have made the mistake of buying cheap, poorly made local machines are soon back in the market replacing them with more expensive, more sophisticated systems built here. They’ve learned the hard way that they can’t afford the loss of time and profitability because of a poorly performing machine.