To better survive in a global economy, high-end companies have diversified their product lines to include low- and mid-priced pianos, setting up factories or forming alliances with companies in parts of the world where labor is cheaper.
Since the 1990s, a dozen or more European makers of high-quality pianos have been aggressively marketing their pianos in the U.S., challenging entrenched interests and creating more choice and higher quality in the high end of the piano market.
Cheaper equipment for computeraided design and manufacturing has allowed for their more widespread use by small and large firms alike, with a consequent increase in precision of manufacturing at all price levels.
Foreign firms and investors have combined low-cost Chinese and Indonesian labor with high-quality design and manufacturing expertise, parts, and materials from Western countries to greatly increase the quality of low-priced Chinese and Indonesian pianos.
The economic emergence of China during the 2000s resulted in a new wave of low-priced, low-quality pianos appearing in the U.S.
Rising wages in Korea in the 1990s caused much of that country’s piano production to move to Indonesia and China.
Together, these imports put most low- and mid-priced American makers out of business.
The Japanese “invasion” of the 1960s onward was followed by a wave of pianos from Korea in the 1980s and ’90s.
Here are the highlights of what’s happened: However, over 30,000 new acoustic pianos are sold here annually under some 70 different brand names, made by more than 30 companies in a dozen countries. in any real quantities, which combined amount to no more than a few thousand instruments per year. Today, only three companies make pianos in the U.S. By current standards, many were not particularly well made. by about a dozen different makers, which together turned out hundreds of thousands of pianos annually. (with the important exception of the growing number of pianos from Japan) were made in the U.S. When I began servicing pianos during the 1970s, most pianos sold in the U.S.