Your team sources from RFQs and spreadsheets. Nobody has walked a real factory floor. Nobody can tell a serious CM conversation from a showroom pitch. Quotes arrive by email — not across a table.
This is 8 days of participation in the supply chain: floors, price, negotiation literacy — so one person returns able to challenge quotes and brief the organisation with firsthand context.
Buyer: Company sponsor (often not travelling).
Traveller: Often an ops, sourcing, or engineering delegate.
Designed to deliver: less naïve on floors and quotes.
Steven: signature moments (opening dinner, strategic briefing, closing synthesis) · lead guide runs the week
Deliverables (Booking Form): priced BoM + sourcing playbook + trade-finance contacts + post-trip brief template — venues remain indicative.
The week
| Day | City | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shenzhen | The machine — welcome numbers talk, Huaqiangbei supply chain walk |
| 2 | Shenzhen | Components to products — sourcing sprint, CM sit-down |
| 3 | Dongguan | The factory floor — injection molding, PCB assembly, worker conversation |
| 4 | Guangzhou | Infrastructure speed — Nansha automated port, Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link |
| 5 | Guangzhou | Supply chain — Shein deep dive, wholesale market, live-streaming |
| 6 | Foshan / Zhuhai | Industry + energy — manufacturing cluster, battery lab |
| 7 | Hong Kong | Finance + trade — trade finance roundtable, HKEX |
| 8 | Hong Kong | Systems + departure |
What they’ll do
Access classes flex with what opens that week:
Welcome — the numbers that matter. Dinner with data that reframes everything. Shenzhen: 40 years from fishing village to 17 million people. GBA: 86 million people, $2 trillion GDP, 40% of China’s exports. One hour drive: 90% of world’s electronics components. “By Friday, you’ll understand these numbers with your hands, not just your head.”
Huaqiangbei with a supply chain lens. Walk SEG Plaza: “This stall: 0.5 mm pitch connectors. One SKU. Ships to 40 countries. This building: 18 floors of IC distributors. Higher floors = smaller volumes, higher margins. The global chip shortage was arbitraged here, on floor 14, by a guy with a WeChat group.”
Huaqiangbei sourcing sprint. Teams of three. One real Bill of Materials: 15 line items for a simple consumer product. Mission: source every component within three hours. Negotiate price. Get MOQ. Document stall, floor, building. Debrief: “Who got the best price? Why?” Professional sourcing agent work done live. These lessons cost companies millions.
Contract manufacturer sit-down. Dinner with a Shenzhen CM owner. Not a sales pitch — a real conversation. “How I quote a new product. What kills margins. How foreign companies get ripped off. The five mistakes every first-timer makes. How I vet a client in 10 minutes.” No NDAs. No PowerPoint. Unfiltered advice over dinner.
Injection molding — from pellet to product. Walk a Dongguan molding factory from raw material intake to finished goods: resin pellets → drying → injection → cooling → ejection → QC → packaging. Touch the mold tooling. Watch a 15-second cycle time. “This mold runs 24/7 for three years. Five million shots. Cost per part: $0.08.” The heartbeat of the global consumer economy.
PCB assembly line. SMT assembly. Pick-and-place: 40,000 components per hour, 50-micron precision. Reflow oven. AOI cameras checking every joint. “This line runs 24/7. Output: 5,000 boards per day. Defect rate: 0.1%.” Hypnotic speed. This is why Shenzhen exists — assembly at this speed only works when every supplier is within one hour.
Factory canteen — lunch with workers. Same food, same trays, same tables as 2,000 workers. Facilitate conversations: “Where are you from? What’s your monthly salary?” Workers ask back: “What’s America like? How much does rent cost there?” Supply chains aren’t machines. They’re people.
Nansha automated terminal. World’s first river-sea-rail fully automated container terminal. 5G + Beidou autonomous trucks. Robot cranes stacking 40 m high. Zero humans on the ground. A port with no people — giant robots moving shipping containers at industrial speed. China Speed made physical.
Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link. Drive the 24 km link — bridge → artificial island → undersea tunnel → underwater interchange. RMB 50 billion. Opened 2024. “Before: two hours Shenzhen to Zhongshan. Now: 30 minutes.” Chinese infrastructure scale is a cliché until you’re inside it.
Shein supply chain deep dive. Dinner with a fashion supply chain veteran. Small-batch quick-return model. 100 pieces minimum. Design-to-online: three days. AI demand forecasting. “Traditional retail: 3–6 months lead time. Shein: three days. That’s not fast fashion. That’s real-time fashion.” The system that puts a dress on your phone today and in your mailbox Friday.
Wholesale market + live-streaming. Walk Guangzhou’s fashion wholesale district — 100,000+ merchants, styles updated daily. Watch live-streamers selling in real-time: phone in one hand, garment in the other, 10,000 viewers on Douyin. A 25-year-old with a phone and a ring light outsells department stores.
Foshan manufacturing cluster. Smart home appliance factory — automated lines making rice cookers at one per second. Then Foshan Robot Valley — KUKA/ABB robots assembling products. “Same factories, same families, different tools.” China’s industrial evolution in one city.
Solid-state battery or energy storage lab. When access opens: next-gen batteries being tested — nail penetration, overcharge, crush, thermal runaway. Energy storage is the bottleneck for EVs, renewables, grid stability. Front-row seat to the most important industrial race of the century.
Hong Kong trade finance roundtable. Private roundtable with a trade finance lawyer and a supply chain financier. Letters of credit, INCOTERMS, FX hedging for RMB/USD, invoice factoring, inventory financing, HK vs. mainland company structures. “You sourced in Shenzhen, manufactured in Dongguan, shipped from Guangzhou. Where do you incorporate, bank, arbitrate? Usually: all three.”
HKEX — where Chinese companies raise global capital. Tour HKEX Connect Hall. $5T+ market cap. #1 global IPO venue. “The GBA manufactures products. Hong Kong manufactures companies.” Monday components, Friday capital markets — the arc from materials to listing.
What your delegate walks away with
Contracted outputs stated on the Booking Form:
- A priced bill of materials from live market sourcing
- A sourcing and negotiation playbook — notes from face-to-face volume conversation
- Trade-finance and structure contacts when those sessions open
- A post-trip brief template the delegate fills with what they learned
Who runs it
A bilingual lead guide runs the week. Steven — 26 years owning factories in China — aims for signature moments (opening dinner, strategic briefing, closing synthesis). When he makes a call to a factory owner, it is not a cold introduction.
How to think about the fee
Compared with a bad production run, a naïve quote, or a partner never walked — this week buys sourcing confidence and negotiation literacy. Not an ROI warranty.
Pricing
| Early Bird | Standard |
|---|---|
| US $13,888 | US $18,888 |