Then in the early 1990s another model train maker called Bachman (originally an American company, now owned in Hong Kong) began to make miniature British locomotives. In the shops, they were priced the same as Hornby’s, though they were made in China. And, as Hornby could not help but notice, the quality was ‘demonstrably better’. Hornby was struggling to survive by this time and made the obvious decision. In 1995, it closed its factory in Margate, Kent, cut the Hornby workforce in Britain from 550 to 110, and moved production to China.

The quality of its models didn’t suffer—if anything, the reverse—and five years later it was able to buy up other model-makers who hadn’t made the move in time. In 2004 the company expanded again by purchasing the leading model train-maker in Spain and the assets of a defunct Italian model-maker. Both countries will in future be supplied from the factory in China. But who owns the factory? Not Hornby.

Like many much bigger and truly international brands—Nike and Reebok, for example—it has become a company that ‘doesn’t do stuff’, that is, it makes nothing. Instead it concentrates on brand management and marketing. It negotiates a price with its Chinese contractor, sends the designs of what it wants made to the contractor at his factory near the town of Dongguan in Guangdong, and waits for the results to arrive in England by container. Hornby has no share in the Dongguan factory although it now depends on it entirely for its products. You might say that the only manufacturing secret that Hornby still truly owns is the name of its Chinese partner. [...]