How do you tell if it is a trading company or a manufacturer?

How many kinds of manufacturers are there in China?

 

When you are looking for a manufacturer on Alibaba, you are not sure if it is a trader or manufacturer even though they always prefer to claim that they are the manufacturer, but sometimes they are not, they can be just a trading company.

 

1. A trader who has partnership with a manufacturer.

A trading company that deals with electronis likes to focus on marketing and sales, as well as sourcing and quality control, but sometimes a trading company has only one source of their product, they have partnership with one factory, sometimes they are one of the shareholders of a factory, or they might develop one or two items and have them manufactured at a factory, in all these cases, they always claim that they own the factory.

2. An assembly house.

Some companies are actually an assembly house with a lot of focus on marketing and sales. This kind of companies have a very small assembly house with one or two production lines, but their focus is on marketing, sales as well as sourcing and quality control. In the electronics business such as cell phone or tablet PC, this kind of assembly factories arrange PCBA boards, plastic housing, LCD display and batteries, and hire a few workers to put them together and do some burn-in test. And They call themself a factory because they do have a couple production line and a few labors for assembly and QC.

3. Genuine manufacturer.

This kind of companies start from purchasing the raw materials, and they have their own R&D team, they own some heave machines such as SMT machines, injection mold machine, and etc. Usually their producing capability is very big, they can produce hundreds of cell phone or tablet in just one hour.

 

I am sure that you all want to deal directly with the genuine manufacturer, however, if your volume is not big enough, most of the manufacturers will not deal with you, you might need to deal with their distributors, sometimes it is better to deal with an assembly house or even a trading company.