Exclusive Fictional Interview with Dick DeVos
Candidate for Governor of Michigan

Q:  Dick, the Michigan democratic party is making an issue of Amway's involvement in China and are claiming you exported Michigan jobs to China.   As the former head of Amway from 1993 to 2002 can you comment on this?

A: Well, Scott as you well know, we cannot economically export soap to China.  The wages in China are a fraction of those in Michigan.   We can't compete with China on such commodity type products. It is extremely difficult for an Amway distributor to sell their products at retail prices in the USA, so how do the democrats expect us to be able to export American-made premium priced Amway products in a country where the people earn next to nothing?  Obviously the democrats have not taken any economic courses to figure this issue out for themselves.  

Q:  Dick, the Michigan democratic party is asking why you are investing in China and not in Michigan? 

A:   Scott, that is an easy one.  Our sales in North America have still not surpassed the sales we had in 1997.  Basically the Amway factory in Ada has sufficient capacity.   Due to Amway/Quixtar's tarnished reputation as a viable money making opportunity for individuals, the market outlook for Amway/Quixtar does not justify added investment at this time.   The plant has continually made productivity improvements and the capacity will hold us for some time in the future.  As I said before, it is not practical to export soap and toothpaste to China.  We cannot be competitive there with our cost structure. 

Scott, American citizens will still benefit from the growth of Amway in China.  Like in all new overseas markets we set up, the lines of sponsorship rush to the new country to sign up distributors and stack the distributors to their satisfaction.  Since the majority of the first Chinese distributors are sponsored by the American king-pin distributors, money from their sales were be repatriated to the United States.   Moreover the American kin-pin distributors, like Dexter Yager, Bill Britt,Don Wilson and Ron Puryear will bring back millions of dollars extracted from those markets for the sales of books, tapes, and motivational seminars, which are used for building the Amway business overseas. 

Q:  Dick, the Michigan democratic party is making an issue of Amway's 1,300 job cuts back in June 2000.  Can you comment on this?

A: Sure I can Scott.  As you know those pesky Internet critics, like Sidney Schwartz with his "Amway: the Untold Story" were getting the word out that the real money is not in Amway products but the line of sponsorship support systems of tapes and motivational seminars.  Our sales were dropping fast.  From 1997 to 1998 our sales dropped 19%.  Sales were pretty flat for the next two years.   Had we laid off in proportional to our sales drop, we should have laid off over 2,300 employees instead of just 1,300.

We sued Schwartz and finally shut him up and stopped the hemorrhaging in our sales.   To save money we laid off most of the Creative Resources Unit too.   That layoff caused us some problems.  The following July one of the laid off a people claimed Dexter Yager had sexually harassed her and said she was being fired for the complaint.  We were able to keep the suit secret until this year. 

The effect of the negativity on the Internet about the Amway business being a scam, or worse yet a pyramid scheme was so great we had to change the name of the North American Amway sales operation to Quixtar. 

Plain and simple, we had to downsize because of all the negativity being spread on the Internet about our fine, high integrity business being a scam or an illegal pyramid scheme.  This proliferation of negativity was killing our sales and the ability of people to sponsor others in the Amway business.  All those laid off people need to blame Sidney Schwartz and his Internet confederates, not me.

Q:  Dick, the Michigan democratic party is making an issue of Amway's lobbying involvement for free trade with China in 1999.   Can you comment on this?

A: Well Scott the lobbying had absolutely nothing to do with exporting jobs to China.   I can assure you that.   It was more about getting information.  It is a little complicated but I will explain as best I can. 

We had a publicly traded corporation in Asia known as "Amway Asia-Pacific" (ticker symbol at that time: AAP) that dealt in the Chinese market.   We sold 15% of it to the public and it initially opened trading on December 16, 1993 at $28.88 per share.  Years later, in the third quarter of 1999, as the prospects for MLM dimmed in China the stock fell to a low of $6.875. 

Through our lobbying in 1999 we learned that it was highly probable that the US would support China's entry into the WTO, making the Amway opportunity to the Chinese population an attractive proposition in a few years.  It made business sense to buy back our position at rock bottom prices.   As the stock price tanked we bought our position back up to 97.4%.   We then used our majority holding to force the remaining minority shareholders to sell their shares to us for just $18.00/share. 

We barely made the tender offer for the remaining shares in time before the WTO announcement was made on November 15, 1999.    Amway's 1999 sales in China were just $55.5 million.  Now they are over $2 billion. 

It was purely a business decision to regain control of our sister corporation since we knew something the minority stockholders did not.  Going public raised  a lot of cash in 1993 and we were able to make a tidy profit by buying back the sunken stock at a fraction of the initial offering price in 1999.  It wasn't really insider trading since only the corporation itself benefited from what we learned from the lobbyists.

We had to put up a lot of money to buy all the stock back up in 1999 and we were short on cash.  This however was financed from the 1,300 person layoff in Amway in 2000.  If the stock grew the way that the sales in China have, those shares would be worth a ton today.  It would have cost us billions to buy back that 15% stake now. 

I think the money we paid in lobbying fees was well worth it and we did not export one job to China with the deal.  When we bought back the stock, all that money stayed in the good'ol USA and one dollar did not go to China as the democrats would like to claim. 

Q:  Dick, critics of the Amway/Quixtar business have said that a detailed CD ROM complaint complete with evidence about abuses and illegalities in the Amway/Quixtar business was submitted to the Michigan Attorney General on September 29, 2003 (complaint number 2003315082).  The same complaint was also submitted to the other 49 state Attorney Generals.  The critics state that the complaint has still not been reviewed by the Michigan Attorney General, Mike Cox, who is also a republican.  Moreover, the critics state that other State Attorney Generals were called from the MI AG's office and were encouraged to ignore the in-depth and well documented complaint.   What do you have to say?

A:  Just because my wife was the head of the MI republican party doesn't mean she has control over the office of the republican Attorney General and can sweep complaints about the Amway/Quixtar business under the rug.   Other than that, I have no comment. 

Next week we will have another fictional interview Dick about his plan to improve Michigan's economy.

(this is just a satire....duh)