A friend’s main Chinese supplier keeps dissing him. My friend, though, is not located thousands of miles away in America or Europe. His office is right here in Suzhou. The supplier, for its part, is not some outfit in a garage run my mom-and-pop-Zhou and manned by their cousins’ kids. The supplier has about a thousand employees in Jiangsu Province, a growing roster of international customers, and a major Chinese investor. For all its pretentions of becoming a large international player on the order of a Solectron or a Foxconn, it keeps cutting corners on costs and invoicing my friend for nickels and dimes that should never be billed. Overcharges are rife and miscommunication common. My friend knows his company’s probably become too small to remain on the growing supplier’s radar, but it is still bothersome, given my friend’s company was one of the supplier’s first customers. My friend will start looking soon for a back-up contract manufacturer. Until he finds, orients, and proofs the next supplier, though, his blood pressure will certainly rise a couple more notches.