Experiencing Production delays from your Chinese Suppliers? Environmental Crackdowns are the cause

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Owing to increasing clamor over air pollution, over the past few years China has been making increasingly earnest attempts to control its pollution. This year marks the fourth year of the Environmental Inspection (name TBA), and industries have been hit hard.

This is serious business – a couple years ago, this inspection resulted in 3,000 officials being disciplined and 198 million yuan ($29,860,651.26) in fines being levied. So what is this check about, how does it work, and what are the ramifications?

(There are other places to read up on China’s aggressive war against pollution – I’ll leave that reading up to you.)

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What’s the difference between a Chinese Sourcing & Trading Company?

This is one of the favorite questions that I like to ask candidates when recruiting people for our sourcing team and a lot of them find it difficult to establish a clear distinction. Among a lot of our clients also the line seems to be blurred and a lot of people believe that a sourcing and a trading company are one and the same thing.

There are good reasons why this line is blurred as sourcing & trading companies often step into each other’s domain so I will cover that in a future post. However, I hope I can address some of the key differences between a sourcing company & trading company in this post.

sourcing vs trading company

Process specialization Vs. Industry Specialization:

While there may be sourcing companies specializing in an industry, especially for highly technical industries like automotive, in most cases sourcing companies in China tend to be specialists in systems & processes related to quality control, international trade & supply chain management.

These processes & systems can be plugged into most industries & products. Traders on the other hand tend to specialize in specific products or industries.

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