CHINA VS. US MADE INJECTION MOLDED PRODUCTS
Time is money in the global economy. Finding every way to save investment money and reduce project time is one way to stay ahead in business. There are many ways to reduce costs, and often the lure of sending your business overseas to China looks very tempting. If you’ve thought of sending your injection molding business offshore, you may find the results aren’t what you expect. Or if you have a mold offshore now, you may want to bring it back to US soil. In either case, we’ll discuss what can happen with offshoring and how to recover your assets.Get more news about Hardware Injection Molds Supplier,you can vist our website!
OUTSOURCING IS PART OF THE BUSINESS
For years, outsourcing has become just a standard part of the business. It doesn’t matter the industry. Pick one and it has a low-cost country that specializes in making their products at a reduced cost. For injection molding, China has been a leader in making the molds based from U.S. designs. Design houses in the United States engineer the products and send detailed sketches or raw data files overseas to a lower cost manufacturer to turn the designs into an injection mold. From there they typically mold and/or assemble the products and ship them back to the United States on a freighter. At the best of times, this can be a good business relationship. What happens when that relationship hits a few bumps?
THE LOGISTICAL CHALLENGES OF OUTSOURCED BUSINESS
Outsourcing to a volume manufacturer in China may seem like a good business decision but sending your molding business overseas may bring more headaches than you are expecting. Here are just a few of the problems we have seen with offshore injection molds:
The tooling vendor has given false answers when questioned because they really just wanted your initial business.
The quoted amount was very low, but the final amount for the tooling was significantly higher due to cost overruns. Chinese quotes can often leave costs associated with warehousing, translators, shipping, and insurance off to stay attractive.
The finished mold isn’t made from high-quality materials and creates below average products. There have been cases that the product required a significant safety protocol that wasn’t adhered to requiring a later product recall.
The tooling is unpredictable and only works a portion of the time. It may require a human operator to remove the parts from the mold after molding since labor is very cheap in China.
The shipping quote has many delays due to political tensions between China and the United States, and your products are constantly held up at a port in China or outside the U.S.
Your molding partner doesn’t have the same work standards that you expect, and they refuse to give your molding tools back when requested.
