Archive of Category: Sourcing Management
March 1, 2019
Four weeks ago, I shared with youMichael De Clercq’s blog about his predictions on a positiveoutcome of the additional tariffswith China. As you know, President Trump originally set a deadline of March 1st. We are now at that deadline and,a few days ago, we all learned that hepostponed this deadline...
February 25, 2019
We field a lot of questions about China sourcing and the management of the China supply chain, such as: How is it done? How hard is it? What are the pitfalls? etc. The best answers are provided by China sourcing specialists. To address some of these questions we thought we...
February 15, 2019
As we wrote in our last blog, “Made in China” – Quality and Perception: Intro, China has been known as a source for cheap goods with questionable quality for years. In this blog series, we’ll be exploring how China ended up with this reputation and what technological and economic advancements...
February 2, 2019
In August, 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported on a “$30 million Glass Pavilion [built as] a symbol of America’s ‘Glass City’” in 2006 in Toledo, Ohio. However, this monument, meant to celebrate the city’s great manufacturing past of quality glass, actually was built using glass sourced from China. The...
January 25, 2019
USA businesses that buy Chinese goods are adventurers. They go to the other side of the world to secure supplies of low-cost products for their customers. They brave all sorts of challenges ranging from quality (whether it meets their expectations), price (whether they really got the best price), cost of...
January 18, 2019
We have written about the Chinese New Year (CNY), a.k.a. Spring Festival, every year for the last few years and how it can affect our China sourcing operation. As usual, a wave of closures and delays will hit importers everywhere. So, how do you prepare for this every year? Know...
January 11, 2019
China sourcing alone is a complex concept even before you get to logistics. Then you realize that there are so many moving parts to the logistics steps alone. According to an article we recently read in The Economist, giants like Amazon can now offer shipping products within an hour in...
December 14, 2018
As China opened up its economy in the late 1980s, many western consumer goods manufacturers set up plants or formed joint or cooperative ventures in China in an attempt to capture the opportunities of this emerging huge supply chain. While the production process could easily be built on the existing...