Over the past couple of months, I have noticed the same phenomenon in several situations. Let’s say an importer has placed an order for 4 references to be shipped out together. The supplier announces that one of them will be ready one week later than the others. And we find that the quality of this last reference is significantly worse than that of the goods that were on time.

There may be various explanations:

• Maybe that last product was subcontracted in another workshop that was not incentivized and/or not organized to deliver on time.
• Maybe a component of the delayed reference arrived late.
• Maybe the factory noticed some quality problems, took some extra time to correct them, but didn’t do a good enough job.

My point is that, in most cases, a factory that is unreliable with timing will also be risky from a quality point of view. A manufacturer with a strong quality management system will tend to ship the right products at the right time.

I heard many importers react to a delay by saying “let’s hope it means my products won’t be half-baked”. More often than not, observations prove this wrong.