Wenger opened our Taichung City, Taiwan branch office in 1986 and quickly began making contacts with companies in mainland China. Taiwanese nationals staffed the office since its inception. Due to the influence of our WA (Wenger Asia) branch manager, we knew that relationships in China must come first and the business would follow.
　Most of the business in the early days of WA was completed in Taiwan, and interestingly enough many of those business contacts led us to other contacts in China. I suspect that these relationships were a combination of both business contacts and personal contacts. At the time, there were many Taiwanese companies that could see the future and emergence of mainland China and were making plans to invest, partner and expand in mainland.
　Wenger Mfg and Wenger Asia opened a Beijing branch office in the early '90's to further the relationships and to conduct business. But for our particular markets, we were too early and the office was shut down a couple years later. While the staff stayed on as independent agents of Wenger Asia, the office was closed.
　These agents continued making contacts and building relationships based on Wenger knowledge of extrusion processing and our knowledge of aquatic feed and edible soy markets. These agents began to close business opportunities and staff from both Wenger Asia and Wenger headquarters began making the first of many business trips to China.
　We found doing business in China was not unlike doing business in other parts of Asia, though certainly interesting in its own right. The local customs and cultures are always fascinating to us small-town Kansas farm boys. Perhaps some of that fascination is why we seem to be able to forge strong bonds of mutual respect.
　Over the early 90's our China business was growing and we once again opened our BRO (Beijing Representative Office) and began doing business in earnest. At the time, the Chinese government was really backing the growth of the aquaculture market and as there were no national suppliers for our particular type of equipment, the import restrictions were minimal and our business was robust. We knew at the time that this luxury of easy access would not last long as there were signs that the government would subsidize the ability of national equipment manufacturers to duplicate "Western" equipment.
　Wenger made the decision to make the most of the market while we could and we focused much energy and effort on concluding sales in China. We sponsored many technical symposiums and made many trips from Sabetha and Taichung City in conjunction with our Beijing colleagues. From 1996-1999, China was our top export market. In fact, our volume of equipment to China during one year was double that of our other export markets.
　About that time, national suppliers began marketing replica machines in earnest. We began a JV with a Chinese national manufacturer to supply part of our system package. This JV did not succeed, and this national manufacturer is now the dominant national supplier. In hindsight, I don't necessarily fault this company. Wenger, at the time, viewed the JV as the "beginning of the end" and likely did not put forth the time and effort to really build a lasting relationship.
　Soon, the Chinese government began raising the import duty and making it more difficult for national companies to secure transactional funding for our systems and sales began to falter.
　Wenger still enjoyed a reasonable amount of success over the following years in spite of rising import duties and a rash of national replicas. We enjoyed this continued success due to the relatively low quality of the replicas and their lack of training, service and technical support.
　Beginning in about 2004 the import duty reached 33% and the number of national replicas reached in the high 30's and our sales plummeted. Wenger recognized that our market was over and in hindsight realized it had lasted longer than expected. During this time, national manufacturers began trying to poach some of our China staff and succeeded with a few. Unfortunately, some of these people took along vital information to our national competition. Thankfully, Wenger from the beginning refused to sell our newest innovations in the China market. Instead, we focused on equipment that had been proven and in use in other markets for quite some time. We, in essence, knew that our systems would be copied and offered a sacrificial lamb you might say.

　Lafe Bailey is the Vice President of WengerManufacturing Corporation.