Has anyone else been approached by some chinese people that offer to rid you of the hassle of manufacturing your own parts? The thought being that you could focus your company on the assembly of your equipment and not be burdened with making and storing all of the individual components and sub-assemblies for that matter.
I went down the path with these fellows for quite awhile but I just had one of those gut feelings (I chickened out) about the hole arrangement and bailed out.
Since then I have found that one of our competitors went whole hog with them. Now they find there parts for sale on the internet at a greatly reduced price.
Just thought I'd pass this on so noone else gets stung.
If you put one of your part model files in China, you may as well post it on a public ftp site. Everything is pirated there. A few years ago, a company where I was contracting paid quite a bit have a China "engineering" company reverse engineer a cast aluminum motorcycle starter. The boss proudly shows me the prints and model file that result. Problem was, it was a different design, which you could tell by looking at some of the more subtle shapes. They simply scammed the entire project from some other customer or the factory down the street.
In case you missed it, parts and whole products also get "copied" here in the U.S. Most of the time these are referred to as "competitors", but often they started out supplying the company they later competed against. That is what drives business.
The desire to produce a product for less, and then the desire to do better to get the business back, and then the attempts to do it better for less.
The one thing smart companies do is establish trademarks, brands, trade secrets and patents in such a way as to identify their particular solutions and give them image and some proprietary features.
If you can not take the time to establish a brand with some intellectual property protection, then how can you expect not to have a successful design copied?
I had need to visit Boeing in Everett last year to review the door mechanism on the Boeing 777, its a very intricate clever design. I asked the Boeing mechanics who the design team was on the door system, I was told to ask Airbus the same question as that is where the original design came from :-)
I think there is a big difference to doing a reverse engineering knockoff, and simply lifting someone model and drawing files and selling them to someone else, which is what happened in my example.
It sounds like you would be OK with selling a customer's data to a competitor.
Bill
In case you missed it, parts and whole products also get "copied" here in the U.S. Most of the time these are referred to as "competitors", but often they started out supplying the company they later competed against. That is what drives business.
The desire to produce a product for less, and then the desire to do better to get the business back, and then the attempts to do it better for less.
The one thing smart companies do is establish trademarks, brands, trade secrets and patents in such a way as to identify their particular solutions and give them image and some proprietary features.
If you can not take the time to establish a brand with some intellectual property protection, then how can you expect not to have a successful design copied?
Yeah, all you need is one opportunistic asshole without scruples. The Chinese don't have the corner on that market, it sounds like. Bo is willing to sell cheap knockoffs too. Maybe cheating drives your business, but there are other people out there who will beat you honestly.
That may be true, but it probably depends on what the mold is for. If it is relatively unidentifiable, then there would be no reason to copy it.
We have had molds made in China, and they invariably need repairs far more often than US made molds. It costs more $$ in the long run for molds made there. These days, the only way we have a mold made in China is if the product will also be made there.
You can file copywrights, trademarks, patents, etc. all day long, but if someone in China (or any other country) copies you, how do you sue them from outside their country? It's not easy or cheap.
If you look in my driveway there is a Honda, Acura, Infiniti, Benz and Chevy. The Chevy was the cheapest, but not the best quality. It runs. If you look in my living room there is a Kenwood, a Samsung, an RCA and some cheap DVD player. I don't think any of them were made on shore except perhaps the Kenwood because it is quite old. In the kitchen we have GE oven, Kenmore stove, Amana fridge, Samsung microwave, Ronco rotiserrie (yes it works good), and a Panasonic breadmaker. The range hood is an Allure. And throughout lots of computer stuff. As far as I know all this stuff, whether built here or offshore was built by those who came up with or improved on the idea and therefore got paid for it. If the Chinese took as much time coming up with all those good ideas that the History channel tells us they did in the past I would buy their products. As it is I stay far away from Wal-Mart and the other purveryors of the cheap, low spec and possibly knockoff kind of stuff. You get what you pay for.
Remember, the dollar you save at Wal-Mart might be your neighbors rent money.
the bloody government has the responsibility to protect those whom it governs; they ask for soldiers from citizens to fight it's political causes, we give it; they should provide the "soldiers" (legal muscle) for us to help fight our business causes
They're enforceable here. Whomever is the middle man here can get shut down.
The production guys there are immune for the time being. Until they have their own property rights to protect. Before then, there's no incentive for them to enact or enforce intellectual property rights laws.
Using soldiers to try to change other countries' legal systems has been proven to be generally a bad idea.
The US market can be protected from intellectual property theft if you've got the $$ to hire the lawyers. As for other countries - they've got their own (or lack thereof) laws.
They'll change soon enough. When they have intellectual property of their own they want to protect.
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression. I do NOT approve KNOCKOFFS of customers models!!
Plain and simple, it is wrong to use someone else's drawings or models.
The real problem is with vendors who are "Competitors" masking themselves as "Vendors". I fully understand the issues.
I have a friend who is chief engineer of a sports equipment company, and they work out of California for his division, and have a Hong Kong base, and mold all products in China. The key thing with their products is that the BRAND NAME carries most of the market value in their distributor's eyes. The 2nd thing is each years products are new compared to the year before, so a Chinese company doing a copy can't get the business of distributors.
I see that in medical products where you need to establish FDA registered products, FDA registered manufacturing, and then get major distributor and sales groups in the U.S. to sell products successfully.
Unfortunately, in some arenas, companies need to just assume products might be copied and establish strong IP coverage and figure whether minor savings in mold costs warrant going "to China".
Going to China, even for knowledgeable companies has had problems. I've known companies that switched Chinese vendors many times, and eventually wound up picking the larger, top notch molding and assembly operations with higher costs, so they got the best stability with the most honest supplier.
If you have a patent and detect copies in the U.S., you can relatively inexpensively take your patent and examples to the U.S. Customs and get a hold placed on infringing items, but you can't do anything outside the U.S. without getting foreign patents issued and then litigating in those countries.
The future of patents in China is getting better, though, because China graduates more engineers & PHDs every year than the U.S., and they suddenly see they need to patent their good ideas and sell them in the West, so they are having to take patent law more seriously.
I've had molds built there for really simple things, and they've been for the lowest price (against my recommendations), and they were half hard tools in P20, that were crummy to say the least and did not last long.
I've had a mold base frame built there because the local mold builder said that would be OK and less expensive. Wrong move. They used lots of crummy stuff (soft return pins that galled, which galled me), and left stuff off the mold base that was supposed to be there. Plus they were supposed to use U.S. sized components...but didn't.
I also had a person in a company I was associated with order "the cheapest" mold he could get, and he actually had 4 cavities delivered in a used mold base which looked like it came from the 1950s, and the parts were so far out of sized that the mold was a literal boat anchor. But it was cheap, I'll give them that.
You get what you pay for. Over and over again I see this.
You want something that will run trouble free for 5-10 million parts without things binding, wearing, & chipping or breaking, you are going to pay the going rate for top quality molds.
China really offers the best deal when there is lots of hand work. In many of my designs, there is minimal handwork in the tool, and it would cost me far more hours in travel and collaboration to get a quality tool out of China, so it simply doesn't make time or $ sense to try China.
well you know they are just starting out.. if you are old enough to remember the late 60's there was the 'jap crap' syndrome. china have a whole lot of people trained/training and large industrialisation plans to carry out. unfortunately they are going to be inexperienced or cut corners or even copy and steal things just to give themselves products and a living... give them another 10-15 years and they will be up there with the best of there own merit just like Japan or south Korea has. lets not forget that this whole china arrival was considerably advanced by US companies giving them the opportunity out of near naked self interest. I know things are tough in the US for workers and it aint over but we all saw this coming didn't we.. or at least you did if you read some of my posts ;o) its probably not actually that you shouldn't try china its just you need to build long term relations rather than strip mine for cheap labour and parts. at one time people most likely looked at Toyota and thought it was bad news - now they have car plants in the US...worlds no.1 car maker... so are you in it for today or some where down the line when say chinaxxx corp. makes aeroplanes in the US?
Obviously, the Asians figure "Your Patent is My Patent".
AP today:
BERLIN (AP) -- Police and customs officials investigating suspected patent violations seized dozens of boxes of mobile phones, navigation devices and other gadgets from exhibitors in a technology fair, authorities said Thursday.
Police in Hanover said more than 180 officials were involved in the searches Wednesday at the annual CeBIT trade and technology fair in that central German city.
They did not identify the people or companies concerned, but they said "the background is the number that has been rising for years of criminal complaints by the holders of patent rights in the run-up to CeBIT."
Police said they filled 68 boxes with gadgets, documents and advertising material. The gadgets included cell phones, navigation devices, electronic picture frames and flat-screen devices, a police statement said.
All the exhibitors who were searched cooperated, except one who was briefly taken to a police station, police said. Of 51 exhibitors affected, 24 were from mainland China, three from Hong Kong and 12 from Taiwan. Another nine were German, and one each were from Poland, the Netherlands and Korea.
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