The question I get asked most often is not about the product. It is about us: why would I buy from a trading company when the factory is cheaper? It is a reasonable question and the answer is not that we are cheaper, because we are not always. The answer is that a factory and a trading company are not two versions of the same thing, and the order in front of you is the thing that decides which one you want.
What a trading company is actually good at
One thing, and it is worth stating precisely because it is easy to over-claim. A trading company's advantage is that it can supply many products from many factories. That is not a service description, it is the organisational fact the whole business is built on, and it solves a problem that is genuinely awkward for a factory.
A factory typically makes one or two products. Its business is selling what it makes. If a customer asks for something else on the same order, the factory has a choice: say no, or become a purchasing department for that customer - and for a large plant that is usually not a thing that computes, which is a subject I know from having worked inside one and which I will write about separately. A trading company is set up to do exactly that, and it is also set up to hold the documentation, the freight and the single point of contact for the whole basket rather than for each factory in turn.
That advantage is real and it is also narrow. We have no production. We do not control the process inside the plant, we have not spent thirty years learning it, and when something goes wrong with a batch the factory's people know it far better than we do. Anyone who tells you a trading company is better at quality than a factory is describing a different kind of company from the one I run.
Where a factory is simply better
On price, in volume, on one product. A factory's cost structure is its production. Ours is our operation. For a first order at a modest volume, our long-standing relationships with the plants can get us a real discount, and that discount is sometimes better than the factory's own price - it is not always, and a trading company quoting far under the factory price is telling you something you should not ignore.
But the same arithmetic works the other way once you are buying one product in real volume. The factory has no reseller margin in it, no consolidation cost, no second set of hands between the plant and your warehouse. A factory selling you its own product, on its own terms, at its own volume, is hard to beat - and if the product is one the factory actually makes well, I would rather you bought it from them. I have said that to buyers and it has cost me orders. It has also cost me a lot less than the orders I would have lost later by pretending otherwise.
Where we are not competitive at all
There is a third kind of company, and it is the one that beats us decisively when the order is the right shape for it. A large enterprise can serve a large manufacturer on terms that only balance at scale: an overseas warehouse in the customer's country, next period's product shipped into it before any payment has been received, and collected once the customer has taken the goods. From the customer's side that removes the lead time and the replenishment risk entirely.
We cannot do that, and it is not an effort problem. The inventory cost is too high for our balance sheet, the credit sits with us because we have shipped before we are paid, and we would be carrying that across many customers at once. That is more exposure than a company of our size can hold, and a business that takes that exposure and cannot survive it is not a better supplier - it is a worse one with better marketing.
So the honest answer to "why a trading company" is: because the shape of your order needs one, or because you want one point of contact for several factories. Size is not the reason, and neither is capability. A trading company and an enterprise are different businesses with different balance sheets, and we do not pretend to be the second one. If what you need is the enterprise model, I will tell you that you are talking to the wrong company.
So the question is not which one is bigger
For a buyer and a seller, the same sentence holds: bigger is not automatically better, fit is. A one-product order in volume belongs with the factory. A basket of products, or a product no factory in the network makes, belongs with a trading company. An order that needs stock held in your country and credit extended belongs with a large enterprise.
None of those is a judgement about anybody being better or worse, and it is worth saying that a supplier who argues you should buy from them regardless is telling you something about how they are run. If I cannot tell you which one is right for your order, I am not doing my job - and if I tell you the factory is the better answer, that is a real answer, not a way of keeping your business.