Is it true that Zara manufactures in ships to reduce taxes and reduce factory-to-shop times?

apparently, I am being told that zara/inditex has recently bought/leased ships where it has set up factory workfloors to enable manufacturing to take place on the journey from Asia ( where they buy the material) to Europe (where they sell)Is it true that Zara manufactures in ships to reduce taxes and reduce factory-to-shop times?
Well, if it's true, they're not saying. Here's a write-up of how efficient they are.





Zara is a Spanish clothing company with over 650 stores in some 50 countries. From 1991 to 2003, sales grew more than 12-fold from 鈧?67 million to 鈧?.6 billion, and net profits ballooned 14-fold from 鈧?1 million to 鈧?47 million. Zara has developed a super-responsive supply chain focusing on controlling what happens to products until the customer buys them. The company can design, produce, and deliver a new garment and put it on display in its stores worldwide in a mere 15 days. As a result, it achieves a substantially higher net margin on sales than its competitors. Unlike so many of its competitors choosing to outsource, Zara keeps almost half of its production in-house. Far from pushing its factories to maximize their output, the company intentionally leaves extra capacity. Rather than chase economies of scale, Zara manufactures and distributes products in small batches instead of relying on outside partners, the company manages all design, warehousing, distribution, and logistics functions itself. Rapid transfer of information from shoppers to designers and production staff such hard data as orders and sales trends and such soft data as customer reactions and the 鈥榖uzz鈥?around a new style. Zara鈥檚 organisation, operational procedures, performance measures, and even its office layouts are all designed to make information transfer easy. Zara鈥檚 designers sit right in the midst of the production process and work next to the market specialists and procurement and production planners which increases the speed and the quality of the design process.





Zara has an informal policy of moving unsold items after two or three weeks. This can be an expensive practice for a typical store, but since Zara stores receive small shipments and carry little inventory, the risks are small; unsold items account for less than 10% of stock, compared with the industry average of 17% to 20%. Zara relinquishes control over very little in its supply chain - much less than its


competitors. It designs and distributes all its products, out-sources a smaller portion of its manufacturing than its peers, and owns nearly all its retail shops. Against conventional wisdom Zara produces roughly half of its products in its own factories and has a high degree of vertical integration. This leads to a level of control impossible when outsourcing or offshoring. Thanks to the responsiveness of its factories and distribution centres, Zara has dramatically reduced its need for working capital. Because the company can sell its products just a few days after they鈥檙e made, it can operate with negative working capital.

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