Import & logistics from China for equipment and materials

Context

Importing equipment from China is where deals quietly lose money: the wrong supplier, an unverified quote, a delivery cost discovered too late, paperwork that stalls at customs. The headline price on a Chinese quote is rarely the real price — the difference hides in duties, fees, certification, delivery legs and the assumptions a factory silently makes about the destination market.

This direction exists to price and supervise exactly those parts: the unglamorous middle between finding a product and receiving it.

Approach

Suppliers are sourced and verified before any quote is trusted; offers are compared and configured against the real requirement rather than the catalogue default; landed-cost economics are calculated before commitment; and the shipment is supervised through foreign-trade documentation to arrival. AI augments the sourcing and B2B correspondence — supplier discovery, offer normalization and bilingual communication — while verification and the final numbers stay with a human.

The core discipline is comparability: offers arrive in different currencies, trade terms and configurations, and are normalized into one comparison structure before any decision is made.

Vehicle sourcing: the duty threshold as a filter

For an electric-vehicle import engagement, the decisive engineering fact was regulatory: the preferential recycling fee is computed from nominal engine power, not the peak figure vendors advertise. A catalogue of 31 EV models was verified against the 150 hp nominal threshold, turning a legal nuance into a hard sourcing filter that excludes models whose real landed cost jumps by hundreds of thousands of rubles.

On top of the catalogue, 20 turnkey configurations were costed within a fixed 1.4–1.8M RUB budget band — vehicle, delivery, duty, recycling fee and commission itemized — so the buyer compares final drive-away costs, not showroom prices.

Equipment sourcing: RFQ engineering for structures

For a sports-facility roof system, the scout compared four structural types — fixed, sliding, retractable and membrane — across a shortlist of six Chinese factories with verified contacts, from dedicated sport-canopy specialists to steel-truss membrane plants. Specifications were collected down to material grade: PVDF membranes of 650–1050 g/m², steel frames in S235JR/S355.

The critical detail was climate: Chinese base designs assume mild-climate loads, so every RFQ in the package requires recalculation of trusses for the destination snow and wind zone per the local building code — snow load of roughly 1.5 kPa in the client's region. A quote that skips this recalculation is not cheaper; it is a structure that fails its first heavy winter.

Outcome & what shipped

A working business direction with accumulated, reusable practice: supplier search and verification, offer normalization, landed-cost calculation before commitment, RFQ packages that encode destination-market requirements, and order supervision through documents to arrival. Shipped artifacts include the 31-model EV catalogue, three selection dossiers as client-ready PDFs, and the roof-system supplier report with per-factory question sets — each engagement leaving the next one a template.

What we built

• Supplier sourcing & verification

  Suppliers found and checked before a quote is trusted; six factories shortlisted with verified contacts for a single structures engagement.

• Offer normalization

  Offers in different currencies, terms and configurations brought into one comparison structure before any decision.

• Landed-cost economics

  Final cost itemized before commitment — vehicle/equipment price, delivery, duty, recycling fee, commission — 20 configurations costed within one budget band.

• RFQ engineering

  Requirements packages that encode destination-market rules: nominal-power duty thresholds for vehicles, SP 20.13330 snow-load recalculation for structures.

• Foreign-trade supervision

  The shipment supervised through documentation to arrival.