Manufacturing and Quality Control blog

Recently an American business executive named Chip Starnes was literally held hostage inside his office at his company's medical supplies factory on the outskirts of Beijing. Chip's imprisonment - which spanned nearly a week - started when it was announced that some of the manufacturing processes at the plant would be moved to India and that employees involved in those processes would be laid off.

Western buyers working directly with Chinese manufacturers must overcome a number of obstacles in order to do business smoothly. These include huge time differences, varying perspectives on product quality, obvious language barriers, and also more subtle cultural gaps. Bridging this cultural divide can work wonders for western buyers.

Have you ever struggled with the question of when to buy factory direct and when to go through a vendor or trading company? Importers are often highly motivated to secure the lowest per-unit cost possible for the items they purchase from China. The old maxim of “cutting out the middleman” leads many buyers to reason that purchasing factory-direct is the only way to get the lowest cost of goods sold, and is thus the only smart option for buying from China.

If you have a novel or innovative product and you are interested in using China’s formidable manufacturing sector to bring your product to market, protecting your intellectual property is likely high on your priority list. So how do you protect your intellectual property?

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The Canton Fair is held twice every year, once in the spring and once in the fall. The fair takes place at the (aptly named) China Import and Export Fair Complex in the Haizhu district of Guangzhou. April 15^th marked the opening of this year’s spring fair, the 113^th session of the Canton Fair since it began in 1957.

Walmart released a statement to all its suppliers, dated Janunary 22nd, outlining a new Ethical Sourcing and Zero Tolerance policy regarding unauthorized sub-contracting that is in effect as of March 1st, 2013. This update to Walmart’s Ethical Sourcing initiative comes in the wake of a horrific fire that tore through a Walmart supplier’s facility in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, reportedly killing as many as 120 people. Tragically, the letter was released just days before another blaze would claim 7 more lives at a factory in the same city.