We, as interpreters and consultants, in a very important position of your business model, will help you achieve your target in a very effecient way.
Here are some information provided by a local consultant who is very experienced in international trade.
There are many suppliers on Alibaba, however you don’t know whether there are manufacturers or not, maybe they are traders, you just don’t know, how do you tell a manufacturer from a trader?
Here is a simple tip, look at their address, if it is located in the city area such as Futian, Luohu and Nanshan district, and they don’t have any other detailed address, most of the time, they are just traders, as the factories can’t be located in the urban area, sometimes some suppliers claim that they are manufacturers and even put both their office and factory address on the website, however their factory addresses are either not detailed, or do not exist at all, you can’t find it at all.
So you might want to tell your friends that they are liars, you can do that, however, I would say this is a very popular
business model in China, as you know it is quite expensive to run a factory with those production lines, SMT machines, injection machines and employment of so many people, and it is not so easy to fulfill the capability of a factory unless you can give them some very big orders such as 30K to 100K sets per month. Because of reasons listed, the factories will try to get orders from different sources, such as the local traders. And the traders need to partnership with these factories too, in fact, they act as the factories’ sales departments.
Some people want to be self-employed, because they don’t want to work in any company, so they set up a company with a HSBC bank account, and they pay to be a member on Alibaba, from where they can get a lot of inquiries, and they claim that they are the manufacturers which they are not but partnership with them.
