Ferrero Rocher: Accidental Hero 49
esis of Ferrero Rocher’s link with China and its gift-giving tra-
ditions.
Establishing a Route-to-Market in
China
By the mid-1980s, the demand for Ferrero Rocher and other
consumer products was there, but China’s impenetrable, tan-
gled mess of bureaucratic regulations and arbitrarily applied
import duties kept most goods, including Ferrero Rocher,
from being imported for sale. Throughout the 1980s, China
had an outright ban on the issuance of importing, trading,
and wholesaling licenses to foreign companies. The situation
was even too much for Hong Kong’s great import and export
trading houses, such as Jardine Matheson and Company and
Swire Pacific (fictionalized as Straun and Company and Roth-
well-Gornt, respectively ...