China has become the number two stone exporter in the world behind the Italians (surpassing them some months, especially in granite), and is a powerful player in the stone industry, but the quality can range from excellent to terrible. How do you know what you are going to get? How can you maintain the level of quality if your intial orders seem to be OK? What happens if a problem occurs?
The only way to really know what you are going to get is to make a trip and visit the factory, but this is often not fool-proof because the factory you visit may not even be the factory of the company you are going to buy from. They may be a Trading Company that is really a sub-contracting factory buying from another factory like a broker, no matter what they tell you. Every company states "we own the quarry" and "we have our own factory"... this is not always true, and if you do not read Chinese you will not even know the name of the factory when you visit.
You need someone based in China that can interact on a daily basis in Chinese to handle the problems that come up, to research new ideas, and to find new factories when one becomes unreliable.
There are many horror stories about companies sending inferior product and these stories are true. For every 20 factories inspected only 2 or three may be suitable, but those 2 or three, if you can find them, will produce top quality product at great prices, enabling you to have a competive edge in your market.
The problem is that sometimes you find a supplier that is reliable for the first several orders, and then things change. The prices start going up, the quality drops off, and all of a sudden you have a problem on your hands. Any company, whether Chinese, American, Italian or Peruvian is only going to be a reliable partner if they guarantee their work and are honest. What recourse will you have when a supplier decides to cash in their honesty for a short term profit? Unless you are willing to travel to China (and make sure that the Chinese factory is aware that you will be on their doorstep if there is a peoblem), you are better off going through an agent of the factory residing in the US that has their own person in China to trouble shoot, to interact face to face, Chinese to Chinese as many times the problems you will encounter are cultural in the way they are handled and can be very frustrating when logic and common sense are not involved in the negotiation settlement.
The key to success may be having a back-up plan in place at all times. In case the factory with whom you thought you you were going to have a long term relationship, gets "careless", you need to have another factory at the ready to take their place. An agent residing in the US will have several other factories to steer towards. An independent agent functions like a broker, but operates with lower markups to keep the competitive edge against Chinese trading companies that will sell direct.
|
|
|
|
