A senior Chinese official said on Thursday that Mattel has admitted it took full responsibility for design errors which led to the recalls of millions of Chinese toys.
"In a letter to Li Changjiang, head of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, an executive from Mattel admitted the company should take full responsibility for the recalls," said Wei Chuanzhong, vice minister of AQSIQ, referring to the design faults in toys with tiny magnets that could be swallowed.
The company also admitted that there were nothing wrong with Chinese manufacturers over the recalls, said Wei at a press conference held in the Chinese embassy in Washington, adding some 85 percent of the Chinese toys recalled in the past weeks were due to the design problems.
A Chinese investigation into the latest recall has found that the toys were produced according to Mattel's specifications, he said,
Only 15 percent of the toys targeted in earlier recalls contained excessive amounts of lead, said the Chinese official, noting several Chinese manufacturers involved in the scandal have been harshly punished.
A report released by two Canadian business professors days ago also concluded that most of the recalls of toys made in China are because of design errors, not manufacturing problems or the lead paint issue.
The report, which analyzed Chinese-made toy recalls by going through recalls issued by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission from 1988 to August, 2007, found of the 550 toy recall, 76.4 percent were due to problems that could be attributed to design flaws.
Of the 20 million toys recalled by Mattel in the past month, 80 percent were because they contained small magnets, which is a design flaw, said the report.
Source: Xinhua
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