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China Company Verification: How to Vet Suppliers in 4 Steps

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist — 4 Comments

China Company Verification

All too often I hear Buyers making supplier selections on highly arbitrary factors, primarily the responsiveness the sales rep on the other side. Such factors are largely irrelevant. A supplier selection without the right data is often the root cause of quality issues further down the road. In this article, we explain how you can perform a China Company Verification by analyzing their documentation. This procedure can be managed from your office, and doesn’t require an on site visit.

Consider it a first step of the selection procedure, as there are limitations to what can be done from a distance – as compared to more comprehensive, and far more expensive, factory audits. The ideal outcome is identifying a number of potential candidates. In this article, we look into two sets of documentation, company related documents and product related documents, and the role of buyer references and US customs data. Continue reading China Company Verification: How to Vet Suppliers in 4 Steps

Electronics Regulations & Standards: Ensuring Compliance in China

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist — 1 Comment

Electronics Safety Standards

Most countries and markets, including the United States, the European Union, Canada and Australia, sets strict requirements for the performance and safety of electronics products. This should not come as a surprise, but the complexities of ensuring compliance with overseas electronics regulations and standards, in China, is not as obvious. In this article, we explain how you can avoid compliance issues and forced recalls in three, well, not so simple steps.

Step 1: Confirm Applicable Electronics Standards and Regulations in Your Market

While some standards or directives may apply to all types of electronics, others may apply specifically to certain devices and functions, for example WiFi and Bluetooth enabled products. The table below contains a brief summary of standards and regulations in the United States, the European Union and Australia: Continue reading Electronics Regulations & Standards: Ensuring Compliance in China

Importing ODM Products from China – A Complete Guide

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist — 4 Comments

ODM smart band in Shenzhen

Today, Chinese manufacturers in virtually all industries can offer a wide range of ‘catalog products’, or ODM (Original Design Manufacturing) products, serving as a ‘ready made template’. You can choose to buy the ODM product as a no name product, or have it branded with your company logo. You can even make small modifications, including the change of colors, materials and functions.

For many buyer’s it doesn’t make sense to buy an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturing) product, unless an entirely new design is the only way to realize a certain product concept. For many buyers, especially Startups and SME’s with limited budgets, it makes much more sense to buy ODM products. In fact, it’s often the only option. In this article, we explain the top 5 benefits of importing ODM products from China. Continue reading Importing ODM Products from China – A Complete Guide

How to Avoid Delays & Save Time When Buying from China

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist — 1 Comment

Saving time when outsourcing

Good things sometimes take time. Sometimes, far longer than most importers first anticipate. Slow communication, misunderstandings and endless sample revisions can cost businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost profits. That’s exactly what we address in this article. Keep reading, and learn what you can do to get your products delivered on schedule, without cutting corners.

1. Purchase ODM (Private Labelled) Products

Developing a new product from scratch can be far more time consuming. Chinese manufacturers may provide limited assistance, but they rely on you to provide them with the complete set of documentation and files required to produce tooling and prototypes, prior to mass production. New OEM designs must also be tested, and it’s often very hard to foresee design flaws and technical issues before a pre-production sample is made. Even the simplest apparel design may require several revisions before your specification is translated into a reference sample that is ready to hit the production lines. Continue reading How to Avoid Delays & Save Time When Buying from China

7 Ways to Prevent Quality Issues & Scams When Buying from China

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist — 2 Comments

outsourcing risk management

When buying from China, adopt the mindset that everything will go wrong – until the opposite has been proven. Business owners making decisions based on assumptions of “how things should be handled”, or “how things are done back home”, are prone to find themselves with a lighter wallet. The key to success lies not in learning the customs of tea drinking, or handing over your business card with both hands. Such things are, contrary to what many so called ‘China experts’ say, largely irrelevant when dealing with Chinese manufacturers.

There are no written rules as to how the process shall be managed. You are entirely on your own, and the outcome is decided by the applied procedure. Extreme pragmatism is the answer. A million things can go wrong, and they will, unless you take action now. Risks must be managed from the very first email sent to a supplier, to the factory floor. That’s what we’ll cover in this article. Keep reading, and learn more about the 6 measures that truly make the difference between success and failure.

1. Supplier Screening: Avoid choosing the wrong supplier from the start

The purpose is to avoid scammer and ‘unqualified suppliers’ from the very beginning. Time is money, and why invest months of work on a supplier that’s unable to ensure compliance with local regulations and your own quality requirements from the very beginning? I don’t need to further explain why you should avoid scammers, but they are out there, and deals that seem to good to be true are often exactly that. Continue reading 7 Ways to Prevent Quality Issues & Scams When Buying from China

Payment By Letter of Credit in China – A Complete Guide

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist — 2 Comments

Letter of Credit

By default, most Chinese manufacturers require a 30% deposit before production. When, something turns out to not go as planned, the deposit, as if by magic, suddenly turns into a non-refundable down payment, never to be seen again. To avoid undertaking such risks, many importers rely Letters of Credit (L/C) to pay their suppliers, which requires no such deposit. Instead, the payment is released only when the goods are shipped.

In this article, we explain how a Letter of Credit can act as an extra layer of security when buying from China – but also why importers cannot blindly rely on an L/C as the ultimate safety mechanism.

How a Letter of Credit Can Protect Your Business

Unlike a regular T/T transaction, an L/C guarantees that a seller, for example a Chinese manufacturer, will receive a payment in full once certain conditions has been met. For importers, an L/C removes the risk of making an upfront deposit payment, before production, while the supplier can be sure that they will indeed receive the money when the batch is completed. Well, that’s at least how it works in theory. Continue reading Payment By Letter of Credit in China – A Complete Guide

Production & Lead Time in Asia: A Complete Guide

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist

Production line in Asia

Lead times, when outsourcing production to Asia, involves much more than assembly, packing and shipment. Yet, many importers are far too optimistic about the time it actually takes to get from deposit payment to delivered produce.

In this blog post, we guide you through the four phases of production, quality assurance and delivery. We also explain how you by simple measures can reduce the risks for serious delays, and why you need to consider the risk of quality issues.

1. Tooling Production

Custom designed products, and components, often require additional tooling, such as injection molds. Prints, for example logos, may also require additional tooling, which by most manufacturers must be ordered from a subcontractor. Making, and adjusting, a new mold may take anything between 14 to 60 days, depending on its complexity. However, the tooling is usually good for more than one order, sometimes hundreds of thousands of units. In other words, this lead time can be deducted from all future orders. Continue reading Production & Lead Time in Asia: A Complete Guide

4 Common Product Development Mistakes When Buying from Asia

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist

Product Development issues in China

Developing a new product is always a challenge, but much more so when samples and prototypes are manufactured on the other side of the planet. This is one, of many reasons, why the product development process is a true minefield, riddled with potential disasters, and the top time killer for small businesses, outsourcing production to China, and other Asian countries.

In this article, we explain how Chinese manufacturers operate, and how this has a direct impact on how the product development process must be managed. We also explain why you should never rely on your OEM manufacturer to manage the product development procedure for you. Keep reading, and learn how to avoid some of the most common, and disastrous, mistakes made by importers during the most critical phase of the whole importing procedure.

#1: Making a Supplier Selection Without Prior Qualification

In a perfect world, suppliers can be divided into two categories: ‘The good’, and ‘The bad’. But in reality, it’s not all that simple. Instead, I see suppliers as divided into three categories: ‘The good’, ‘the bad’ – and suppliers which are ‘good’, yet not technically qualified to take on the project. The latter category is the one I’ll shed some light on here. Continue reading 4 Common Product Development Mistakes When Buying from Asia

Quality Management Systems in China Explained: Q&A with Renaud Anjoran

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist — 2 Comments

Renaud Anjouran

Pre-shipment quality inspections are critical when buying from China. Yet, they may be of limited use if you’ve selected a supplier neglecting your quality requirements from the very beginning.

This is where a Quality Management System (QMS) comes in. We get a lot of questions from our readers about ISO 9001, and other QMS, and how much of an impact these actually have on the final product.

So, we decided to ask an expert – Renaud Anjoran, founder Sofeast, one of China’s leading Quality Inspection and Quality Assurance firms. In this article, Renaud explains what a QMS is, and why it matters when selecting a manufacturer.

Renaud, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into Quality Assurance, to begin with?

I got into this field by following opportunities at the beginning of my career, as often happens. In 2005 and 2006 I was working for a small Hong Kong trading company, and I was spending a good part of my time checking production status and quality in factories.

When I started my company, the first client trained me to do quality control in their suppliers’ factories, and slowly I hired and trained my team. Continue reading Quality Management Systems in China Explained: Q&A with Renaud Anjoran

FCC Certification when Importing from China

Posted on by Fredrik Gronkvist — 17 Comments

FCC Certification

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates all communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in the United States. Electronics creates radio frequency energy by themselves, either intentionally (e.g. WiFi enabled Tablets) or unintentionally (e.g. Power Supplies). Therefore, the FCC scope of regulations also apply to most consumer electronics and electrical equipment, and not only products intentionally transmitting radio waves.

In this article, we explain the basics of FCC regulations, and what you must know to ensure compliance when importing electronics from China, and other Asian countries. Before we get started, I’ll explain the two classifications set by the FCC: Continue reading FCC Certification when Importing from China