I would not say this is totally not true. Even for those big OEM
manufacturers in mainland China (headquartered in Taiwan or USA or
other parts of the world). Just look at the notebooks
by HP/Dell/Acer/... My Dell 600M suffered hard disk failure after
3 months of use and motherboard failure after 9 months. Their
service is excellent but the notebook product sucks. HP/Acer and
others are by no means better than Dell. All of the them are 
really of the same quality (not really very very low quality
but definitely not high enough). 

The problem is the highly squeezed profit margin and lack of the 
quality control measures in place. I will say this is generally
true for the consumer electronics product. Last time our old 1986 
Toshiba TV last about 10 years (actually still works but so clear 
anymore). Now a new Toshiba TV will probably last only 3 years. Lots 
of the product will fail slightly longer than the warranty period, 
even those from the so-called well-known brands like Sony.

Still one need to be careful not to jump the conclusions that all
these vendors are not good. One need to be careful to choose the
right partners to work with and establish mutual confidence.

By the way, SMD parts are generally better produced. SMD machine
is also only bought by bigger companies. So maybe one should go
for SMD parts if possible even though the price can be higher.

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh [mailto:joshuajordan@adelphia.net]
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 9:49 AM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [EE:] Low cost PCB Fib in the US

There is a very big problem with using chinese vendors.  Once a company 
has regular orders for a particular board with parts in it, the fun 
begins.  There are 'buyers' there who make thier money by finding your 
parts for just a little bit cheaper.  Lets say theres a .1uF cap in your 
board.   These buyers will go out and find a better deal, they might 
save 5 cents on a bag of 1000, for a part that is marginally more 
cheaply made.  They will do this continuously.  Until they are buying 
caps so cheap that your units will fail.  You are going to say 'omg I 
never said to use this cap' and then you are going to realize that the 
entire board is filled with components so cheap that they are always on 
the verge of not working.  Customers will start getting pissed off and 
your return rate will go thru the roof.  All so a guy in china can 
pocket $0.05.  This is china official operating procedure.
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