China Sourcing, SCM/SRM

I have been in the China sourcing or trade industry since long. Or at least I have been thinking to enter into the industry since long long time. When I was pursuing my master degree of thermal science, I was suddenly caught be international trade and finance and was thinking to go to a trade company after my studies (actually I did as you will see my essay about my postgraduate studies and my adventure in southern China.

During the late stay in Shanghai between 1999 and end 2000, I was being convinced by my one of my best colleagues and also by one of my previous friends in a trade company to do trade consultation with the help of the Internet and also their trade license.

I couldn't make decision until sometime in November 2000 but only two month later, I decided to turn to Hangzhou, therefore everything was suspended.

The first half year in Hangzhou was dedicated to e-business. Then I began to receive numerous emails from around the world, requesting for purchase of chinese energy products - mainly solar heaters for residential houses and solar heating systems for commercial buildings, solar PV panels, components (batteries, chargers, controllers, converters) and systems, windpower equipment, steam turbines, power generating systems, gas turbine, power generating systems, hydropower systems, electric meters, boilers, and all kinds of inquiries. Even from foreign countries in China.

My website was quite successful. As the only english-speaking and specialized website, it has attracted visits from all around the world. Several techniques were also applied to improve my search ranking at google.com. And as a results, my websie was always among the top 4 of the search results of key words like "China power", "China electricity", "China hydropower", "China fossil power", "China nuclear power", "China solar", "China windpower" and other words related to China and energy industry with except of the world "energy (ranking about 120)".

From April 2000 to March 2001, I was indulged in sending emails back and forth to companies overseas as well as in China, hoping to gauging the gaps in prices, technical and quality requirement and others. Over a hundred inquiries were received meantime, and many hundreds of correspondences were written, most in english, some in german to facilitate the communications with germans.

An big australian power utilities even entrusted me to source 1000 sets of 1 KW class windturbine units for its construction site in western Australia. A swiss company asked me to find PV panels for notebooks at reasonable prices. And so on.

To my surprises, most chinese supplies either ignored my inquiries or sent me back some capriciously prepared, error-prone offers, some even in chinese. My colleague told me you have to make phone calls to them, because chinese people don't trust emails. I thought phone calls are equally unreliable, even more because an email sender has to learn how to use the Internet and emails and therefore is more educated than a phone dialer. Every body knows how to make phone calls, but not every body with Internet. On the other side, emails are quicker and cheaper. And lastly, it was me who offered export chances to chinese companies, not vice versa. But my ideas didn't prevail. Here there's a strange mentality - in some parts of the world too.

After such a long time of try, I surrendered. With local people you can't do business unless they know you by persons. That's not my philosophy. It takes time to know somebody well and I couldn't afford that.

Sometime in January 2003 I considered to act as agency or independent contractor for international sourcing companies in China. I have contacted several of them, but there was no positive answers. After two weeks, I gave up that idea.

And later that month, I have spent a month or so on studying major SCM (Supply Chain Management) and SRM (Supply Relations Management) from major developers such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Edwards etc, trying to become one of their solution provider, technical supporter, trainer or localizer. Only a minor play in the area responded. I was not particularly keen to work with that brand.

My friend in Shanghai asked me to source wooden carve for his german friend, and other room decorative such as vases, pens, calendars etc. I spent a week, collected enough information an then sent out bunches of inquiries, only to get one reply from a wooden carve manufacturer - one month later, in chinese, without any information of who he was.

I was completely disappointed by the chinese mentality and determined never to do export business with chinese, and then it's the end of my China source career too.