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Does anyone recognise this Chinese moulded case - YORKTRON

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peter-h:
I think on-shoring is happening but not with the big names. Not with those who have their own people sitting in China and kicking butt as required. And on-shoring will be causing a lot more chinese firms to go bust than do anyway.

What may happen is that china will to some extent go back to making the cheap and simple stuff they started with decades ago. That is not what they want, obviously. But their behaviour will bring it about.

Import duty from China is only about 5%. It would have to go to 50-100%, or 500% on phones, to make the big names do on-shoring.

Shipping is not insignificant but still worth doing. The 3k little transformers will cost perhaps USD 100 by DHL to ship back. So the chinese get 3000 x USD 0.50 or so, plus I pay $100 shipping, plus 5% import duty.

It does not make sense to build complete products out there anymore, because the labour content of assembling a PCB in a box is very small, and labour intensive wiring can be designed-out. I did this a few years ago; no longer making complete products out there. Just bare PCBs, cables (RJ45-DB9 etc), txf winding, springs, and plastic parts are coming back home now, although I am getting shafted to pay 2.5x the last price for 10k which I will buy (it is the UK price too) and ship the tool back with the 10k.

NiHaoMike:

--- Quote from: peter-h on October 03, 2021, 08:38:00 am ---The 2nd company, after shipping 10k cases, increased the price 3x (basically the UK level). They did this right after the tool was paid for (another standard Chinese practice) and came back down when I refused to pay it. This time I asked for the tool to be returned to us, and they did another standard Chinese thing (excommunication; works because they know a Westerner will never travel to China to see what is going on)

--- End quote ---
Ask Naomi Wu for help, she did something similar with a company that insisted on in person visit to get GPL code for a product they're selling.

Bud:
I bought plastic handheld enclosures from China. They came with the halves misaligned and twisted so it was not possible to assemble them properly. Never again, and can't be happier.

floobydust:
OP, did I stumble onto your enclosure here? Bud Industries Plastibox. Perhaps your enclosure was an OEM part and that door got closed.

china can make good quality, it's just that people sort by price and buy the cheapest. The better shops appear to only be OEM's to third-party sellers. Example Ritec Taiwan is OEM for some Hammond enclosures, and Bud Industries plastic enclosures are also top quality - but either is totally impractical because they are stupid expensive and... Bud Industries does not do the Metric system. Sigh.

peter-h:
The Bud ones look similar but aren't the same. They could be Chinese but at their prices (about 10x the actual cost) they could be moulded in Switzerland :)

Yes it is certainly true that the reason why most Chinese stuff is crap is because most (all but the very big) Western companies make their premium products back home and buy the cheap end of their range from China. That serves two purposes: you maintain your domestic expertise etc while serving the cost sensitive markets where customer demands cannot possibly be fulfilled from domestic production (by a factor of several times, usually).

The problem is that unless one has one's own people out there (possible only for the biggest companies like Apple) one cannot run strategically vital production in China, because you never know when the supplier will blow up or try to shaft you. I don't see any way around that, other than by buying a large quantity, enough to last a few years, and then reordering when there is say a couple of years' of stock left. Then you always have a year or two to sort out a new supplier, and the cost of the "stolen" tooling is a smaller %.

Taiwanese stuff is more upmarket; better quality and more expensive, and the companies are more stable. One middleman I have been using for many years, until recently, for contract manufacturing, withdrew from China totally a year or so ago and is now using purely Taiwan.

I've looked at PCBs from S Korea but the prices are high and comms were difficult.

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