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Shenzhen

Electronics in Shenzhen: who makes the board, who assembles it, who tests it

Three separate trades that a single quotation often hides. Knowing where the boundaries are tells you who to hold responsible when something fails.

France → China

An electronics quotation from Shenzhen typically covers the bare board, the components, the assembly and some testing, presented as one price per unit. Behind it there are usually two or three companies, and the one you are talking to may only do one of the steps. This is normal and works well — but when a batch fails, the question of which step caused it decides who pays, and that is much easier to settle if you knew the structure beforehand.

The four steps

  1. The bare board. Layers, finish, impedance control. Board houses are a specialised industry and rarely the company you are negotiating with.
  2. Component sourcing. The largest share of your cost and the largest source of risk: substitutions, allocation shortages, and counterfeit or remarked parts.
  3. Assembly. Placement, reflow, through-hole, the enclosure. This is usually who quotes you.
  4. Test. Functional test on every unit, or a sample. The difference is a real cost and a real quality decision, and it is very often left unstated.

The two clauses that prevent most disputes

  • No substitution without written approval. A component swapped for an « equivalent » is the single most common cause of a batch that behaves differently from the prototype.
  • A named test procedure with a pass rate. What is tested, on what proportion of units, and what happens to the ones that fail.

Why the region is fast at this

Because all four steps sit within an hour of each other, and the components are available the same day. A board revision that takes three weeks in Europe can take three days here, which is the real reason hardware teams come. That speed is only available to someone who can be in the loop — it collapses to European speed as soon as every iteration has to cross a time zone and a shipping delay.

Ask for the bill of materials with manufacturer part numbers, not descriptions. « 10 µF capacitor » leaves the choice to the buyer; a part number does not.

Keep reading on this.

ShenzhenWhy hardware moves faster in ShenzhenIt is not that people work harder. It is that the distance between a question and its answer is measured in streets rather than in weeks.ShenzhenHuaqiangbei: what the world's largest electronics market is actually forIt is not a place to buy. It is a place to find out, in an afternoon, what your product costs to build and who already builds something close to it.China sourcingWriting a specification a Chinese factory can actually quote againstThe factory is rarely the problem. The specification given to the factory usually is — and it is the cheapest thing in the whole project to fix.ShenzhenInjection moulding in China: what you are really buyingYou are buying two things with very different lifespans — a steel tool that lasts years, and parts that come out of it. Confusing them is where the money goes.

If this raised a question about your own project, tell us where you are — the first conversation usually clarifies more than a proposal.

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