There’s a big difference between making a good mold and saving money on manufacturing. You can make a good mold anywhere in the world. However having a good mold made is only a small part of the equation. It takes 6-12 weeks to make a tool. Material, product and production quality is a much bigger part and it can span years.
It’s easy to save money on mold and lose tenfold on parts. What we do is make the mold in the most cost effective place worldwide but we always run production here in China. We tried to run production overseas only to come back with our tail between our legs after having to criss-cross the globe flying engineers to scratch their heads over supplier based failures spending weeks in hotels and eroding any potential savings. Not to say we don’t make mistakes, it’s just easier for everyone to solve issues. It only takes one failure to learn this lesson and if you learn it on someone else’s back (mine for example).
I wanna say that China have many good mold manufacturers which could supply high quality molds and products in reasonable competitive price. That is no doubt. We got some good regular foreigner customers, they trust us and could accept reasonable competitive price. And they also could win many customers in their market and earn much money. If customers only wanna get lowest price, I can understand that they wanna get big profits. But in fact, they usually were cheated by some scammer or they have to get low-quality products.
A good supplier is that he knows what the customers need and what level of customers’ requests. And then could offer reasonable rice. They could solve problems with you once problems happened. Most of Chinese people are friendly. Then long term business is coming.
What we can notice here is that many customers are leaving China because the transportation costs are more and more expensive every day, the lead time is short, and then it is needed to have someone to make the follow-up, so everything is counting to increase the costs, and I mean, the final costs. Even if the tool has a better price, after all the expenses added, we have a European tool cost, and unfortunately sometimes, the quality of the product doesn’t match with that cost.
