Transfer pricing.
Suppose you are a Chinese company trying to evade US duties or evade currency controls in China. Set up a paper company in Singapore and sell goods to it at just above cost. Then resell via your Singapore company at actual market value and accumulate your profits in Singapore.
Singapore operation could be “adding value” by just receiving bulk packed goods and repackaging for retail sale. Or it could be doing minimal assembly. Or it could be flashing firmware that turns $10 PCBA into $700 ventilator control system.
Nah.
That does not turn it into manufacturing.
More like, trade. Retail and wholesale trade.
The added value would be in trade.
Happens in all countries.
Wholesalers sell a product to retailers at $100, retailers sell at $120, let's say, then that $20 mark up is profit of the retailer and added-value, but that added-value is in
trade. Wholesale and retail trade. Not in
manufacturing.
Manufacturing value added, or simply manufacturing, counts only manufacture.
Which ventilator exactly uses a $700 ventilator control? From a $10 PCB?
I also think the wafer fabs in Northcoast, Woodlands, Tampines, Pasir Ris are real. Do you? Or you think the
wafer fabs are imported from Tiongkok and counts as 'transfer pricing'?
Looking at some of the responses in this thread made me realize the socio-economic composition of this forum better. Quite a lot of nitwits here, the not so well to do, the not so well informed, the not so knowledgeable and intelligent segment of society - the riff-raffs the taxi drivers the security guards if you like, comingling here apparently.
Explains why average IQ is so low approaching CECA level.
Does Tuas biomedical park count as transfer pricing?
Or Seletar aerospace park? count as transfer pricing?
Or jurong island? or showa denko hard disk media manufacturing?
Of course stinky chinks are dumb as rock, like all slanties but perhaps more so, and that's why you see no stinky MNC. Most are foreign MNC. But that doesn't change the fact. That manufacturing is done in stinkypura.
Unless you think hard disk media is also made in tiongkok and re-packaged in stinkypura (wtf! how the hell do you re-package hard disk media?

) and re-sold (to whom exactly? to thai? to tiongs themselves?

).