It is no secret that the vast majority of sporting optics out there are not made by the companies that sell them. They are manufactured by the various OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) out there, predominantly in Asia. For riflescopes that typically means Japan, Phillipines or China, although there are other Asian countries perfectly capable of making them. The only other ones I can think of offhand that either make or used to make riflescopes are South Korea and Taiwan. Several Bushnell scopes are made in Korea and Swift products as well. I do not know if Swift has their own factory or if they use an OEM or if they are the OEM. Taiwan has made a few PU replica scopes in the past. There may be others I am not aware of. I think there is an OEM type company that hails from Taiwan, but they make stuff in China.
Vietnam and Thailand both have lens and camera manufacturing plants, so we could see riflescopes come from there in the future. It is a very similar skill set and workforce.
For the time being, vast majority of Asian scopes are from Japan, Phillipines and China. However, the whole supply chain is really muddied by how interconnected, in many ways, these places are. It is also really not that critical, aside from political considerations, where the product is made as long as it is done by a reputable place. It has not always been this way, but although Japan still offers higher end products, sometimes I wonder if it is largely driven by the fact that the market is willing to accept a $2500 Japanese scope, but not a Chinese one. That perception is clearly changing. We already have nearly $2k spotting scopes from China that are very good and $1200 riflescopes that do really well against their competition.
To me, it is intellectually interesting how all these OEMs developed. Japanese and Phillipino OEMs (some Phillipine OEMs are owned by Japanese companies) essentially started with simple, but well made designs and moved on up in terms of system complexity and additional features from there. They sorta already had the fundamentals worked out and worked to improve from there. Chinese OEMs mostly took a different path. They arrived on the scene later during a different age of consumerism with so many people shopping on the internet sight unseen. They started out making cheap crap and then added a bunch of fancy looking features. That made their products into feature rich crap aimed at mall ninjas. Once that was reasonably established, they started getting the fundamentals worked out, so the product improvement path was very different from how the Japanese, for example, went about it. The end result, for better Chinese OEMs, is mostly the same, they are now making a good product and fighting their historically bad rep.
Anyway, country of origin mostly talks about the place where the product is finally assembled and aligned and even then, it is not clear cut. For example, some US based companies re-align optics they get from their Chinese OEMs or add additional features, like turrets.
Then there is the mostly unimportant, but annoyingly persistent question of where the internal parts, bot optical and mechanical come from. From a quality and performance standpoint it is arguably the single stupidest thing to worry about, but people really obsess about this anyway.
Here is the simple answer to this: if you a willing to pay a particular company your hard earned money for a $1500 (for example) riflescope, that means you trust them to figure out where to get the internal components. They do this for a living, so they are usually good at it. If they are not, their competitors will kick their ass.
It is entirely possible that a particular scope you are buying is assembled in the Phillipines, with the mechanical internal components machined in China, individual lenses sourced piecemeal from China, Japan, Phillipines, Taiwan and Korea, with final testing done in the Phillipines and partially repeated in the US. For larger volume manufacturers, they might even be ordering the same components from multiple sources to make sure they are not entirely dependent on a single subcontractor.
Lastly, also keep in mind that some OEMs only offer their own designs that are essentially labeled with a particular brand's logo. Others do that, but they will also "build to spec" and "build to print".
"Build to spec" means that they will re-work a design or develop a new one to hit a particular set of specifications.
"Build to print" means that they are strictly a manufacturer: essentially, you make your own optomechanical design and they build it for you.
In the optics world, we have some of each and some that are a hybrid.
Essentially, it is all a convoluted mess that we should not be worrying about. It all comes down to how well a scope performs overall.
Not bad, but a little more width would help. The tripod is Field Optics Research's Dome Top Hunter 32.
Rather amazingly, the balance on this thing is just right as is.
