1. Do you really trust the factories produce bearings by themselves?

While the customers may have placed the bearing order at the factory, but it doesn’t mean the factory produce these bearings themselves. There are some customers who complain about the quality of the bearings when they receive them, even losing faith in the Chinese bearings, but why is this happening? One reason is that customers are attracted by a cheap low-quality price; the second reason is that customers trust the factories too much; they think the factory can control the quality of the produced product.

In China, many factories do not manage the production themselves; some trade business and buy products from other small individual factories in order to gain a higher profit, but these small factories can’t control the quality very well, so they are faced with ongoing quality problems.

2. No any factory or supplier can produce all types of bearings.

Each factory or supplier will tell you they can do it all and do it well, especially in China, but it’s not true, you need to be aware of what kinds of bearings each factory can produce.

How to solve this problem? You need a partner(KTAI) to help you find the right factory and control the quality.

• KTAI will compare several factories for the same type of bearing.
• KTAI will visit and check the factories for you, including processing equipment, testing equipment, workers’ skill levels, management system certificate, production range&quality level, etc.

We will identify the qualified factories, give them the order, and then we will keep on record the customer feedback on the quality of their produced bearings.

3. The material from factory should be high quality, not cut corners.

Some factories cut corners by using cheaper materials. Here are some examples for your reference:

• steel balls: if the grade should be G10, then the factory can change it to G16.
• heat treatment: the right operation should put the same type of bearing in one oven, not put different types of bearings in one oven– this can prevent some of the bearings from meeting hardening standards.

4. How the trading companies earn money?

• export rebates: some trading companies export goods to abroad. In this case, the Chinese government will return some money to the company. The price that the trading company is offering you is same as the price that the factory offered the trading company, so there is no additional cost. Some trading companies will add port charges and some service charges (not much money).
• Before you give the order to a trading company, they will ask other factories to compete with the price, then they will take the lowest price to discuss with their regular supplier to get the highest profit. Some factories will agree, but they can’t guarantee product quality, as everyone knows, quality is proportional to the price.
• The third way to place an order is through a purchasing agent, they don’t earn money on goods, so when you have orders, you should give a commission to your Chinese agent, maybe 5%~10%, even a little more. The advantage is that the agent can help you source the right bearing factory and control the quality.

In China, there are some famous B2B platforms for buying bearings or other products, like Alibaba, Made-In-China… They are a really good source to find suppliers of products with different quality and amazing price, but do you believe them completely?

First, let us think about “why you can’t find the real bearing factory?”

Many importers or end users want to buy bearings from China. This is because Chinese bearings are cheap in price and the quality is becoming better, but if you need to satisfy the two conditions at the same time, you need to know Chinese bearing factories and market conditions very well, e.g., like knowing the small or middle-scale factories whose price is cheap and quality is good. But many buyers don’t have good resources, don’t know how to find the right bearing factory, and don’t have the time to visit China to identify this information on their own through inspection. Why does this happen?

1. some factories don’t publish their informations on an English website. 

It’s very common in China that no one can speak English in these small to mid-scale factories, so it’s impossible for them to publish their product information on an English website, like Alibaba, Globalsource, or other free B2B platforms. They generally deal exclusively with Chinese trading companies because they think that is the simplest way.

       2.  most factories don’t know how to use online marketing

Many customers like to source bearings through Alibaba. Using the Alibaba platform, you can find some of the most popular companies on the first page, but when you check with them and research carefully, you will find that many of these are trading companies. In addition, some of the companies pay money to Alibaba in order to be found on the first page, such as keywords ranking, PPC, company fixed ranking, etc., and these trading companies know better than factories about online marketing on Alibaba.

Google Search is the same as Alibaba. If you want to display on the first page, you must have your own company website. But most factories don’t have their own English website in China, and they also don’t understand the importance of Google SEO, SEM, PPC, keywords.

Most customers get leads on potential Chinese manufacturers from local connections and sources:

• your local industry trade association
• famous B2B platforms, such as Alibaba, Global Sources, Made-In-China etc.
• international trade shows in your country or in China
• search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.

You can confirm some factories through Alibaba or trade shows, but are they real factories? How about the production capability? What machines do they have? How about the quality? To resolve these questions, you would need to visit these factories or find a third-party partner to help you.

One suggestion for you: Choose the manufacturers that do most of their exporting to the U.S. or European countries, because these manufactures usually have higher quality standards and have experience with meeting the quality demands and safe export of ball bearings for international export.

Some customers only check the factory bearing quality of the samples. Then they think that the delivery will be ok because the sample was ok. But if they never visit this factory, how can they ensure the sample is produced by their factory? Maybe they are buying good quality items from the local market. And while the factories can produce impressive samples, you should see the average quality from a batch of bearings.

Now KTAI already has dozens of reliable bearing factories, and each type of bearing has 2-3 factories to compare. In China, there are so many factories, but we have our own rules to estimate and track these factories:

• factory size and how many workshops
• processing equipment & testing equipment
• numbers of workers & their skill level
• management system certification ISO9001 & TS16949
• products range & quality level
• factory’s advantage and disadvantage
• production capacity by month
• check to see if all processes are identified and controlled

Noted: a good factory should have on-site testing capabilities to verify the bearing’s performance. They should be able to test the bearing’s steel material, metallurgy, dust proof, grease leakage, noise, vibration, hardness. These are important for a bearing; otherwise, the parts are at a risk of failure during use.

Our technical team will record data on the questions above for every factory we work with. Additionally, we will keep this data updated regularly. We not only conduct a quality inspection after the product is finished, but we also check at random times during the production to ensure there are no problems. If we do find a problem, we will ask the factory to resolve the situation and we will record this experience in our system for reference in the future.

KTAI is very serious about the way we treat each customer, and every customer wants to find a capable and reliable partner that will satisfy their specific needs. We are confident we have the skills necessary to be your partner on the ground when dealing with bearing factories in China.