What China can learn from the ashes of my boat

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Not a day passes without me screaming at televisions, pepper grinders, lawnmowers or Tupperware. Such poor design. So badly executed. If only Steve Jobs or Sir James Dyson had made you, damn it!

Hence my sadness at the news that Apple cars will remain a dream. Who didn’t want to see what the maker of the iPhone — the most popular, elegant and functional product since the Post-it note — could do with automobiles?

They would have driven themselves perfectly out of the box. A superb finish taken for granted. Such high standards are no doubt behind Apple’s decision to cancel the project — too many corners would have to be cut.

Quality is an amorphous concept yet its importance to value seems obvious. With the arguable exception of Microsoft — I have spent more hours watching its hourglass than my kids growing up — the biggest companies in America all make the best products in their fields.

Likewise in Europe’s Stoxx index, ASML is the globe’s highest quality builder of lithography equipment, Novo Nordisk of diet drugs and LVMH of luxury goods. In the top ten, not even Nestlé piles ’em high and sells ’em cheap.

The exception country-wise is Japan — but only because its long obsession with quality even overwhelmed any focus on shareholders. And sector-wise, there is still the odd mega bank around, despite them trailing far behind best practice at everything.

I was pondering the issue of quality and China’s woeful stock market performance even before my boat was destroyed by fire on Monday. The cause was a Chinese lithium-ion battery overheating or exploding — as more than 1 per cent of them now do globally, according to Gitnux data. Luckily no one was killed. Memorable, but not a great advertising slogan for a country with a poor reputation for quality.

In a recent European survey by GfK, more than 40 per cent of…