Jan et al.
Something we (Leica) have always done is to take the high road in terms of talking of our competition. As you say, it's no secret that Zeiss has outsourced some of their manufacturing. I suggest you approach each of the other companies directly to find out where each of their products is manufactured.
As far as the warranty/guarantee, Leica guarantees that we will service almost every Leica product under the sun, no matter how old. We have a very good warranty and, in the case of the US market, a fantastic Passport guarantee for the first three years. The reason why I emphasized "written" is because other companies offering "better" unwritten warranties can change them at any point. Our lifetime passport guarantee was written from 1999 - 2008, and we honor every one of those cases to this day despite our change in warranty on all product sold since. I can assure you that the cost of indefinite free service for alpha optics is so astronomical that such guarantees will go the way of the dinosaurs in short order. A prediction, yes, but one based in market analysis.
It's one thing to offer unrealistic guarantees and another to provide excellent customer service. The latter, in my opinion, is much more important. I can tell you first-hand that we at Leica USA have made great progress towards improving the latter. Understand that we have three engineers who are capable of servicing all of the sport optics that come through our repair department, so sometimes we get backed up, but in the end this level of expertise is why Leica is synonymous with excellence and longevity. In some cases in the past we had issues with triaging these cases, but again, over the last eight months we have worked hard to make the changes necessary to regain confidence in our customer service department (and you can see this in some of the recent comment threads on this forum). As I said previously, if you have an issue in North America, please contact me directly and I will work to make sure your issue is dealt with in a timely and satisfactory way:
[email protected]. If you have an issue elsewhere, I can help direct you to the best person to deal with it.
Cheers
David