Bai Li Manufacturing Company Ltd.
Gouliwei Industry Park
Lobang Road, Longgang District
Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
20 Jan 2021
Dear Mr. Li,
My company, RadFlight, has designed a cool new line of motion controlled drones that use smartphones as the controller. We are looking for a manufacturing partner, and your firm is one of the candidates we’re having a look at.
This will be our first experience of partnering with an overseas manufacturer, and before discussing specific technical details, I’d like to explore two sets of general concerns. The first set are the issues that might come into play with any manufacturing partnership, but particularly one located at quite some distance from our offices. The particular questions here are transportation costs, delays, quality control, and the risk of intellectual property theft. Can you let me know what practices and policies you have in place to minimise the downsides here?
Second, U.K. companies that work with overseas production partners face an increasing amount of scrutiny from the news media and activist groups regarding such matters as workplace safety, worker rights, and environmentally sensitive manufacturing. We can’t directly control what takes place in your factories, of course, but we would have to deal with the public relations fallout if any problems are uncovered in the factories that make our products. The fact that Apple and other major western companies have spent millions and worked for years to promote good conditions in overseas factories and still haven’t been able to avoid all problems raises concerns for a small company such as ours.
Please share your company’s philosophy and strategies for mitigating these two sets of concerns.
We would like to commence production in the second quarter of 2021, so a quick reply on your part would be much appreciated.
All the very best,