My Story
I spent 15 years in foreign trade, and I've learned one thing for certain: finding the right supplier in China is harder than it looks. Factory prices look great on paper, but quality issues, missed deadlines, and communication breakdowns can turn a good deal into a nightmare.
That is why I do both jobs myself. Procuring the material and checking what arrived are one job done at the same time, not a hand-off between two departments — the person who picked the factory is the person who reads the certificate. After 15 years in foreign trade I know which plants deliver consistently and which ones cut corners, and I check every batch against your specification before it leaves China.
I started in 2011, and I've seen countless buyers get burned by the "cheap and fast" promises. My approach is different: reliable quality, transparent communication, and partners who stick around for the long term.
The part of my career that nobody else can copy came first. I started in foreign trade. Then, because my English was the one that was useful, I translated for a factory's technical team, and after that I was assistant and translator to the industrial director — who was a foreigner and did not speak Chinese. That is the whole reason I was inside the plant instead of in front of it. I sat in the meetings, I saw how production is actually run and decided on — which steps get checked, which get recorded, and which get done differently when nobody is looking. And I did a period of purchasing myself, which is where the way I judge a counterparty came from.
Both sides of a trade want the same thing, which is not really the price: that the other side is real, that the money is safe, and that the deal gets honoured. That is what the negotiation is actually for. I have written down what I have seen about that, and where I got it wrong, in Counterparty risk and in my Trade Notes.
And on the question that comes up more than any other — why buy from a trading company when the factory is cheaper — I have written plainly about what a trading company is good at, what a factory is better at, and what we cannot do for a large order. It is in Factory or trading company.