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How to Sell Your High Value Equipment to China, Part 3

Monday, March 20, 2017 4:10
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(Before It's News)

China contract lawyersIn my first post in this series (here), I described the five basic attitudes Chinese companies have regarding advanced equipment being sold into China.  In part 2 (here), I set out two of five tactics high value equipment sellers should follow when selling advanced (and therefore expensive) equipment into China: One, do not discount, and two, get paid before you deliver your equipment to your China buyer.

In this, part 3, I wrap up this series by setting forth the remaining three tactics equipment sellers should employ when selling their equipment to Chinese companies.

3. Do not deliver the equipment until first verifying that the conditions for its installation have been met. Remember that the Chinese side believes your equipment works based on an almost “magic” formula and your rules on how to set up for its installation and the specifications for its use are just a subterfuge you use to “hide the magic.” The detailed set up work is therefore unnecessary. Meeting the specifications is not necessary. So the Chinese side will not do the proper set up and they will ignore the specifications. But then when your equipment does not work as it was supposed to, the Chinese side will blame you for its failures.

The following are two (of many) true stories that illustrate how this typically goes down:

  • A heavy equipment manufacturing company delivers iron pipe casting equipment. The conditions of sale provide that the floor of the casting room must be perfectly level. When the equipment is delivered, the casting room has an uneven dirt floor. The casting machine does not work and the Chinese side does not pay a single penny on the contract. The Chinese bank that guaranteed the payment sides with the Chinese buyer. Why create a level, clean concrete floor for a dirty machine used for metal castings, one of the China company’s engineers asked at one point.
  • A water power equipment manufacturing company delivers a new hydropower generation set of equipment. The specifications provide that the current flow can never exceed 6 knots. When the equipment is delivered, the Chinese side installs it in an unapproved location where it is well known the current exceeds 8.5 knots. Within one year, the entire facility is destroyed. The Chinese side defaults on the last payment and the reputation of the foreign company is destroyed. The foreign company lost money on the project and never did another sale in China.

Foreign equipment sellers cannot rely just on clear contractual specifications and then relying on the specifications when there is a problem. The foreign seller should itself ensure the conditions are met before it delivers the equipment. And if the conditions are not met, the foreign seller should not deliver. If there is a cost in confirming your Chinese buyer has met the specifications (and there usually will be), you should build that cost into the cost for your product. Remember: the failure of the installation is always your fault and the Chinese side will always find a way to make you pay for that failure. We have said this before and it made people mad, but some of our most experienced and sophisticated and successful China essentially charge a premium to Chinese buyers simply to cover themselves in advance against these sorts of problems.

4. Build required training and after sales maintenance and support into the price of the equipment. No matter how much your potential Chinese buyer tries to get you to decouple the pricing for maintenance and support (and then eliminate it entirely) do not make these optional add-ons that are billed for an additional fee. If you make these optional and charge extra for them, the Chinese side will almost always choose not to pay. So you have to force them to accept training and support as part of your sales price.

Why do the Chinese refuse to pay? Your trying to require them to pay for after sales maintenance is just you admitting that your product is somehow defective and why should they buy a defective product. If properly manufactured your equipment should work forever, with no service or maintenance required and your trying to make the Chinese side pay for training and service as an add-on is you unfairly seeking to increase the price of a product that is already unfairly expensive.

There is one exception related to training. If the Chinese side is planning to clone your equipment, they will seek extensive training in how the equipment operates. Their goal though is not training; their goal is to somehow obtain the formula that will allow them to clone your machine. For this reason, you should carefully control your training with Chinese companies.

During training, the Chinese side will ask for more information and more training time than is necessary. They will also insist on visiting the U.S. manufacturing facility and they will expect to spend substantial time in that facility. For this reason, all training obligations must be carefully defined to prevent your costs from skyrocketing out of control. You should carefully limit time, location and access to information. One good way to control this is to require the Chinese pay by the hour for all training provided in excess of the basic training included in the purchase price.

Many foreign equipment suppliers say they will provide whatever training proves “reasonably” necessary. This sort of an approach is nearly always a mistake because neither Chinese companies nor Chinese courts truly understand or employ the concept of reasonable. You therefore should state state with precision the training you will be providing, where you be providing it, who will be providing it, and for how many hours you will be providing it. The same rules apply to provision for after sales support. Chinese companies tend to abuse after sales support obligations. So those obligations should also be spelled out clearly in your contracts as well. Again, I base this not on any “feelings” I have about China, but based on my having represented countless foreign equipment sellers on countless China equipment transactions and on what I have heard from other equipment companies and from other China lawyers who represent them.

5. Protect your IP through with a China-centric contract. Protecting the intellectual property you have in the advanced equipment you sell into China should be a core goal in all of your sales. Understand the basic approach from the Chinese side: your product is too expensive and b) any form of IP protection is just a unfair device you are using to force them to pay the unfair price of the machine. So the goal of the typical Chinese company is to purchase one or two items at a bargain price and then clone them in China at a “fair” price.

The obvious way to protect the intellectual property in your advanced equipment is to register your patents in China. But for various reasons (including time bars) this is often not possible. Where there is no patent registration (and oftentimes even when there is), your best solution is to incorporate basic IP protections into your sales agreement. This is essential for China.

To accomplish this, either your sales contract or a collateral agreement must provide for the buyer agreeing to the following:

  • Buyer will not reverse engineer or manufacture a copy/clone of the product or engage any affiliate or third party to do the same. A complex legal definition is not required. A blunt, simple statement (in Chinese) is what is required.
  • Define confidential information information (such as the information you provide in training and support) and require no confidential information can be used by your buyer or by any affiliate or by any third party to infringe on your product.
  • Provide for monetary damages if these restrictions are violated. Injunctions rarely work in China, so contract damages are required.
  • Impose these restrictions with a written agreement enforceable by litigation in China. This is a key requirement. Your English language sales agreement that is enforceable in the New York or in London or in Geneva is not going to be helpful in protecting your IP and if it makes sense for you to use that sort of agreement on the sell side (and sometimes it does), you should have a separate IP protection agreement in Chinese, subject to Chinese law and enforceable by litigation in China.

We will be discussing the practical aspects of Chinese law and how it impacts business there. We will be telling you what works and what does not and what you as a businessperson can do to use the law to your advantage. Our aim is to assist businesses already in China or planning to go into China, not to break new ground in legal theory or policy.



Source: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2017/03/how-to-sell-your-high-value-equipment-to-china-part-3.html

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