Companies evaluate a China presence as a new line in the budget, against a baseline of zero. That baseline is wrong. Working at a distance already costs money — it is simply spread across travel, rejected shipments, extended lead times and decisions that took six weeks instead of two days. Putting those two columns side by side is the only honest version of the calculation.
What absence costs, in the order people discover it
- Trips. Two or three a year, each a week of someone senior plus flights and hotels, and each one still too short to finish anything.
- Quality incidents caught after shipping rather than before, where the choice is between accepting the batch, reworking it in Europe or sending it back.
- Time. Every clarification is a round trip; a decision that needs three exchanges takes a week, and a project that needs twenty decisions takes a season.
- Price. A supplier who has never met anyone from your company prices the risk you represent, and you never see that line.
- Opportunities that never surface: the better supplier nobody introduced you to, the component that would have halved a cost.
The forms presence can take
- A third-party inspection per shipment. Cheapest, narrowest: it tells you whether to accept a batch, and nothing else.
- A representative on the ground who visits, negotiates and follows production on your behalf. Covers the whole list above without a structure to run.
- Your own employee, which requires a legal entity and becomes worthwhile at a volume and continuity that most companies reach later than they think.
The decisive variable is not your turnover. It is how often something needs looking at. A company placing two orders a year does not need presence; one iterating on a product does, and usually discovers it after the second bad batch.