With the emergence of B2B platforms like Alibaba and e-sourcing, small and medium size enterprises (SME) get the impression that sourcing in a remote country is easy like buying on eBay. It is obvious that new technologies with Internet like Chat, social media, B2B platforms, have brought so many tools that can be mixed often to efficiently provide the needed outcome with good suppliers and products. However, for higher performance, it is important to know perfectly them, which required more and more experience with all the possibilities.But this is not enough and in a country like China, remote sourcing has many hidden risks and cost. Advantages from a local team can be various:
– Benefit from lower cost agents, yet very professional,
– Same time zone to profit from working hours period,
– Communicate and negotiate in local language for higher efficiency and limit misunderstandings,
– Cultural knowledge for long term business partnerships,
– Samples can be checked before oversea shipment and payment is make in local money, faster, cheaper and sometimes with lower taxes,
– Control the local logistic locally which means close follow-up and cost management,
– Inspect the good and factories faster and cheaper,
– Build relationship with suppliers being closer to them, facilitate the communication and mutual respect.
All those criteria were considered when we decided to locate SAOS’ main office in Shenzhen, next to Hong-Kong, with idea to maximize our customer value.
Will it be the case that e-sourcing become a standard for international procurement and happening in the future? Not any soon, at least for SME, but surely within 10-15 years, local agents and above all, the money draining traders, might be skipped.
What is missing then for e-sourcing to be the ultimate solution? I believe, before everybody could do its own sourcing in China safely and remotely, key progress are needed. One of them is to create a powerful B2B social network that goes beyond, both Linkedin and Alibaba, use and capability. While Alibaba is making significant improvements with new features, lots of scam are still reported. Also Linkedin today is not exploited enough to share experience with suppliers, and there are too many cases where buyers want to hide their suppliers from other buyers, because perceived as a competitive advantage. This is existing since many suppliers lack of international marketing knowledge even if it is slowly improving.
At SAOS, we think that information sharing is our strength to provide trusted and professional services. Too often in China, information protection leads to corruption and abuse of power which cannot bring long term benefit to either buyers or suppliers. It is important we not only bring service added value, but we also need to explain our customers the hidden values using sourcing services from a company like SAOS.
