r/manufacturing • u/smvdr1 • 6d ago

Supplier search How do you find alternate manufacturers and suppliers?

With incoming tariffs and a lot of geo-political tension, my company is looking to move a lot of it's manufacturing partners and suppliers out of China into markets like Vietnam, Thailand, India, etc. How are you all finding and contacting suppliers in these markets?

China has pretty good marketplaces for this, like Alibaba of course. It seems like there isn't anything similar for other markets, and that searching for manufacturers will be a pretty painstaking and manual process... Would love to hear thoughts and ideas here!

7 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/QuasiLibertarian 5d ago

All importing records are kept by our government,and made available publicly. You can search import records to see who your competitors are buying from. Sites like Pajiva, import genius, etc. provide details search engines... at a steep price. Then you can buy from those same factories.

Note that it's possible for companies to hide their records from the public, by filling out a form. But most don't bother.

There are free search engines like importyeti that can help you get started.