[Overway Overseas] Things Your Supplier Never Told You About China

Over the next few months, we will be taking you on a journey to learn about the Chinese marketplace, the hub of smartphone replacement parts for independent repair locations. After opening our own office in Shenzhen, we learned how different the process is compared to what suppliers had told us in the past. Our Videographer, Eric Overway, weighs in.

Traveling internationally can always be tough. But an 18 hour flight into China with roughly 15 Lithium Ion Batteries and a couple of cameras can be incredibly weird. Having a camera as a foreigner draws constant attention and is completely banned in government controlled areas like security checkpoints and customs as well as other parts of airports. Filming and taking pictures in the open market areas we’re going to show you can be nerve-wracking. Some of these shops are extremely wary of anyone recording their efforts due to them not always being legitimate. My goal here is to give you an exclusive look into these areas in an effort to dispel misconceptions about what goes into the parts you’re buying and show you what we’re doing to improve our parts.

In the first 24 hours of visiting our team out here and getting the rundown of the city I’ve realized three major things:

Everything I ever imagined about China was completely backwards
Traffic is the definition of “controlled chaos”
The city of Shenzhen is quite possibly the largest city I’ve ever seen or known to exist

Shenzhen covers about 800 square miles of land in the Guangdong province. You’d be hard pressed to walk anywhere in the area that I’m staying in without seeing at least 100 bicycles in any direction all lined up and ready for rent. Public transportation is similar to a city like New York City or Chicago but on an astronomically larger scale. Everyone in the city rides the metro, a bike, or owns a moped. Cars aren’t nearly as common, which I can only assume is help control traffic jams and pollution. 12 million people in one city all driving cars would be unimaginable.

I’m staying in an area known as Shekou, about a 30-minute metro ride away from our office. Most of Shenzhen is divided into very large districts similar to zones in the U.S. Vast areas are completely covered in residential, industrial, or commercial developments. Shekou is just a few minutes from the water and a short cab ride from the bridge into Hong Kong.

Our office space resides in the Huaqiangbei International Maker Center where inventors and entrepreneurs can collaborate and explore new ideas together from all over the world. Operating in Huaqiangbei allows our U.S. procurement team to work in China with the unique ability to maintain constant real-time communication with the partnered manufacturers and QC operations so we can continue to improve our parts day in and day out. This area also provides an invaluable market to buy tools and raw materials as well as meet with nearby manufacturers. It’s worth mentioning that the food around this area is phenomenal too, and that helps a lot with the long days we have here.

It’s seems customary to start and end later in the day to work more closely with U.S. customers, but alongside this, employees work long hours, but work at a fairly leisurely pace. It’s all about efficiency and getting the job done, but nobody is interested in injuring themselves working too hard.

We have two separate locations for our manufacturing facility and our small parts/testing facility in the area. Having these exclusive locations allows us complete customization over the conditions and methods of manufacturing of our Basic, Select & Prime product lines. Every step of our screen creation including the LCD manufacturing, adding small parts like LCD connector foam pads, camera brackets, testing, packaging, and shipping can all be completed and methodically altered to our exact specifications in real time.

Other suppliers can use what’s known as “market buying” as their primary source of parts, but this can lead to excessive amounts of defects, troubles with returns and an inconsistent supply chain. Over the next few months, we’re going to give you a window into every side of the market here in Shenzhen and show you exactly what’s going into our screen lines and what we’re doing to constantly improve them. One thing you’ll see is our process of creating an MD Select screen from start to finish, from the raw materials to a finished screen. That way, when the package ends up in your shop, ready for installation on your customer’s device, you know exactly where it came from.

This weekend we’ll give you an inside view into my trip over to Shenzhen as well as walkthrough of our office space, and in the coming weeks we’re going to give you a first look into all of our processes at our MD China office as well as the gadget and parts marketplaces in the neighboring areas.

Stay tuned over the next few months while we answer the biggest question you’re all asking: