Case studies · 2026-09-12

"A quote 20 percent lower: how much the records can explain"

What follows is a walk-through of a typical situation, anonymised - not a customer's words: three quotes, and only one is clearly low, for the most familiar of reasons.

The situation: a quote 20 percent below the others

Three quotes. Two are close to each other; the third is 20 percent lower, says "we have our own factory, no middleman", and pushes hardest to close. A low price is not a problem in itself. The problem is that the gap has to have an explainable source - and the part with no explanation is usually carried by the buyer in the end. A factory that can supply for years has to include materials, labour, compliance and after-sales in its price; when one item is "saved", it usually reappears somewhere else. Where this gap comes from is the one sentence in the quote that most needs explaining.

What the public records did show

Public records show registration status, business scope, social insurance headcount, registered address and outbound investment, as well as trademarks and administrative licences held by the company. But a claim of "our own factory" cannot be supported by the two characters "production" in the business scope: the scope is a registration item, and does not mean the line is actually there or that the workers belong to this company. One easily missed point: companies whose scope says "production" and companies whose scope says "trading" are both common and both lawful - the issue is never whether it is a trader, but whether the price and the story line up.

What the records cannot show

Industry figures suggest trading companies typically add 8-18 percent on top of the factory price, and stacked markups can reach around 25 percent. That is, "20 percent lower" may simply be the middle layer squeezed out - but the public records themselves do not say where the gap comes from. Something else matters more: AI-generated product images and company histories, licences "verified" against forged records, and deepfaked factory tour videos have all appeared. Just "checking the certificate and watching the video" is no longer enough to decide.

What to ask

"Which city is the line in - is the legal entity the same one or a partner?", "Can you quote a factory-gate price with the trading layer stripped out, and write it into the contract?", "What payment terms does this price come with?" When a quote clearly departs from the others, ask where the gap comes from before discussing price - these points can be worked through on the verification checklist.