What he said about China is very true in terms of clean conditions.
In terms of manufacturing it goes China>Europe>USA in cleanliness of their manufacturing operations on average.
Their workers do not have nearly the same rights, and get treated like shit from the employer, but the plants on
face value look so much better than America or Europe.
At the end of the day nobody manufactures shit in the skate industry.
Like you have 3 main woodshops in North America; Schmitt, SkateOne, and Deluxe.
Literally if you are riding north American wood(I believe SkateOne is the only one in America anymore, others are in mexico), then it's coming from one of those 3 woodshops outside of some smaller niche woodshops out their, with nowhere near the quality of those 3 or DSM in china that dwindle uses.
The issue with Chinese wood is the fact the material sits on boats for a long period of time, and this degrades the quality of the wood, especially around Christmas time in North America since everyone is trying to meet production for the holidays.
Now I don't think that would apply to wheels, bearings, or trucks because they aren't wood, but I'm also not an expert in materials science.
Secondly the reason you don't have other people manufacture trucks is because it is prohibitively expensive to mass manufacture unless you got to be able to use someone else factory making the stuff. I mean Schmitt branched out and developed the boards for a shitload of companies.
I do not find it economically viable to not have some model like schmitt for trucks if he wants trucks to blow up in competition.
I mean it has also historically failed in wheels and bearings because lets be real, bones/reds, bones wheels, and spitfire wheels are light years ahead of the market when it comes to quality of their product, and quality assurance on everything they make.