Originally Posted by
SteveLAO
It is recent legislation that allows assay offices to mark in overseas offsites. The offices should be under the control of whichever assay office set it up, and there are different assay office marks for items marked overseas so that you can tell the difference. For example, at London, items marked in the UK regardless of where they were made, has the leopard's head town mark for London. If we were to set up an overseas office, then the leopard's head mark will be replaced by a portcullis mark to indicate overseas marked items under the control of the London office.
I must stress that UK assay offices are not just going to hand out licences to hallmark to locals in whatever country the offsite will be set up. These offiste offices must be rigorously controlled and monitored by the hosting office to ensure exactly the same quality of testing and marking.
Our heathrow office meets items coming in from abroad and marks them at the airport, so we have no immediate plans to go offshore, but this came about as the Dutch assay office, whose marks we recognise in the UK, are able to set up anywhere in the world, and it was felt that this was unfair as up until this recent law change, UK offices were not allowed to compete by marking offshore too, and I understand one or two big accounts in the UK were lost to the Dutch as a result.
Naturally UK offices are concerned that if lots of items do get marked at source this will impact on jobs in the UK, but on the other hand if we aren't given the opportunity then forign offices whose marks are recognised in the UK will be doing this anyway.
I've asked my boss if I can do a fact finding mission for a possible assay office in Hawaii, the Seychelles, Barbados and Fiji, but I've not heard anything back so far...funny eh??
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