thanks for your email and happy national day !
i just got your email and got around to reply to you during national day. to be frankly, it's not easy to understand all the contents of the attachment within 45 minutes. but i tried and it spent me almost 1 hour to read it over.
let me go ahead to answer you the two questions now. because i have been engaging in purchasing field, assume that i am a purchaser of vega:
1. per my personal understanding, if we don't have any value-added services, we just act as a simple left and right hand trader, we will be losing lots of chances to develop ourselves. that's to say, the assume is not correct. we'd better to find a couple of famous or potential foreign brands and franchise their brands. take an example, i have been working for some multinational ems manufacturers and sme independent electronics distributors. the bottleneck of this sector now is that some franchised distributors are trying to do independent businesses and lots of independent distributors are growing up. there are almost 3000 companies around the region pearl river delta except for yangtse river delta. the business style is also under huge pressure and competitiveness and facing challenges from china mainland. you will see something and chinese characteristics if you read the literature "my country and my people" written by mr. ling yu tang. copying is just like thieving ! i hate this kind of behaviour although i am a chinese. we have to, we must innovate ! i have a suggestion that the company should have their own advantages not only frachised brands but also value-added pre and after-services. as said by the attachment "these firms survived by using the low costs of their suppliers as the source of their competitive advantages as well as their specialist knowledge of the sources of the product in the region". except that we develop the advantages that low costs and professional knowledge (low cost and specialist knowledge will also be challenged from another same competitors; in my personal opinion, these cannot be the strengths of the company), we also need to find potential foreign brands and represent their brands as authorized distributors.
the most important, we need to capture business chances by our intelligence and diligence. i.e. sunglass is a very famous brand of italy in the world. as i know the company has established its factory to produce sun glasses and exhibition in dongguan city. one of my friends visited me before national day and he said one of his friends got a potential order about glasses shop funiture from friends. he showed me the layout of the funiture, i help him to translate it into chinese because his english is not good. i seeked out the details of the layout and the customer is actually sunglass. but we gave up the chance finally because the capital reserve in our hands is not sufficient at all.
2. at the same time, we have to focus on the details. you will see what i mean if you once read the book "detail is the key of success". take an another example. i am serving for one of hk independent distributors and our business is not good since the beginning of XX. some sales came in and dismissed after three months because they can't make profit for the company; some purchasers are also not professonal in this field though their english level is emt-8. but fortuntely i made profit almost 13k plus 17k usd gp in the past one month (aug-sep) with my sales. our customer is a big manufacturer in taiwan and they urgently need 10k elpida sdram. we are sure they have already sent the inquiry to many brokers and only we found the sourcing. the sourcing is not online sourcing but offline sourcing, so all of our competitors didn't find it out but us. this is just "detail is the key of success". we read it, we practised it !