USA manufacturing percentages

Wildcat

Wildcat

Joined
Apr 14, 2003
Messages
925
is there any published data that shows what percentage of Buck knives are made in China versus USA? I got into with the guy at the knife shop today. He started claiming that Buck has 50% of their manufacturing in China. that doesn’t sound right to me.
 
It’s been about two years ago that I read that they were at 15% imported and all the rest are made in Post Falls Idaho USA. They also stated they were going to put in some more 300 series tooling and make more models in the factory and fewer imports. Of coarse that was before the covid mess so it might have changed.
 
Makael said:
Counting product categories. 73 Domestic / 20 Foreign. I think its 27% Foreign. this is based on model categories. Not production numbers. I'm sure its much higher Domestic.
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Sounds about right.
People always forget about sheaths, and the merchandise type stuff like T shirts and the odd fishing stuff they offer.
 
DeSotoSky said:
I've had this same discussion /argument at knife shows in the past.
Seeing is believing. Show him a catlog and thumb thru the pages for him.
USA is clearly marked on most.
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Absolutely.

I remember seeing a YouTube video where a guy was complaining about how Buck knives are made in China now, I think he had the bones or something from Walmart and assumed all their knives were made in china.

none of the few dozen commenters knew that this was untrue.
 
Since Buck has knives made in China by subcontractors, it wouldn't make sense for them to promote US made over Chinese.

When it comes to % Chinese vs % US you can't get that from a catalog which only gives models, not the number of actual knives made in China vs US. Buck isn't going to say the real # that's confidential.
 
Bastler said:
It seems to me that the best selling models are US made, so in terms of units sold or total revenue, the ratio of domestically produced Bucks would be greater than 71 to 22.
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Yep. Thats why I was only referring to the catalog and grouped knife model categories.
 
brownshoe said:
Since Buck has knives made in China by subcontractors, it wouldn't make sense for them to promote US made over Chinese.

When it comes to % Chinese vs % US you can't get that from a catalog which only gives models, not the number of actual knives made in China vs US. Buck isn't going to say the real # that's confidential.
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Yep, that's why I was only referring to the catalog and grouped knife categories.
 
I was pretty carefull on where the numbers came from. No official documents. Just quick catalog count.
I guess we could go back 10, 20, 30 years in a brochure and perform the same type of equation and see which direction this is going.
 
Bastler said:
It seems to me that the best selling models are US made, so in terms of units sold or total revenue, the ratio of domestically produced Bucks would be greater than 71 to 22.
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A couple of years ago I was told that Buck averages 5000 regular 110's a week. That would be 250,000 110's a year just in that 1 model.
 
That's pretty impressive.
And it's a really nice knife for the money.

It's also impressive that demand continues to be that high after all these years of production.
 
Do we want percentage of models manufactured in the USA or percentage of total production numbers in a set time from that the USA makes against those not made in the USA. I suspect even if USA produces 70% of their models China very easily may produce greater than 30% of their total production numbers.
 
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