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[Overway Overseas] Exploring the Shenzhen Marketplace


Hey guys, EO here again.

Over the past couple of months we’ve been giving you a detailed look into the Chinese electronics marketplace. Today we’re going to blow the top off the marketplace so you can see what’s really happening behind closed doors in Shenzhen.

Mobile Defenders operates in an area called Huaqiangbei. Over the last few decades, this area has cemented its place as one of the largest and fastest growing hubs of electronics manufacturing and trading in the world. In fact, Huaqiangbei is even nicknamed, “China’s Silicon Valley.”

The market itself is about one square mile in size and encompasses 20-25 different buildings. These are clustered without much organization, due to the ever-changing nature of the city. Companies are constantly moving in and out, and vendor turnover is high. In order to exist in the the phone repair industry, companies need to be able to explore the market and dig through vendors and manufacturers to find the best ones. This can prove to be a nearly insurmountable challenge because of the sheer number of vendors in Huaqiangbei. In fact, we estimate that there are around 25,000-30,000 vendors in the market.

In an effort to perfect the products that you’ve grown to love, we started custom manufacturing our MDBasic and MDSelect screens back in 2017. We found that sifting through the thousands of vendors in Huaqiangbei grew to be too inconsistent and damaging to the industry. If we wanted to have a standard that was higher than the generic market standard, it became pretty obvious what we needed to do; we had to have parts custom manufactured to our specifications.

Probably the largest difference between us and the rest of the industry is the way we procure our LCD displays. Typically, you’d go out and buy finished product from the market, whereas we buy raw materials and have them assembled. Most of you have heard of different LCD brands on the market like Tianma, Longteng, or Shengxiao/Shenchao. When you’re buying a finished piece, it can prove difficult to know exactly what goes into your digitizer layer, what type of glass is on top, or how the frame is manufactured. The actual definition of OEM is sort of a moving target in this industry.

Birth of an MD SELECT

Other US suppliers tend to want a product that appear to be as close to “OEM” as possible, but in some cases, that can mean fake QR codes, fake logos, fake stickers, fake boxes, fake labels, pretty much anything to give the impression that the product they’re selling is entirely OEM.

At Mobile Defenders, we have extremely strict copyright-compliant policies and procurement measures to make sure this doesn’t happen with us. Instead of operating solely out of the US, we opened an office in the heart of Huaqiangbei so we could get to know the market better, and so that we can figure out what’s real and what’s not. We’re well known around the marketplaces as some of the only Americans actually in the city, working every single day to procure and manufacture the parts we ship back to the states.

At the end of the day, it’s easy to be tricked or taken advantage of if you’re not out in front of the curve and involved in the marketplace every day. At Mobile Defenders, we don’t simply believe anything that vendors tell us. We only believe things that we can verify for ourselves, every single time.

I'll have more China news coming to you soon. Stay tuned!

- EO