This pretty much sums up. If I give out a $100 million contract to some company, no matter how big, they will bend over backwards for me to meet every demand we ever have. But even small jobs that's only several million is often taken seriously by even big contractors because they know good performance could lead to those big $100mil -$1 bill jobs I'll award out a few years down the line. If they mess up, they get black listed in my books and lose millions in potential work.
Most definitely agreed. The vendors will always weigh the potential rewards from each potential customer and deal with the delegation accordingly. The Chinese abacus definitely works.
Its kind of funny though, in my experience, the privately owned Chinese companies are usually the ones that go over the top with entertaining the clients, while the state owned guys are more limited by corporate governance, or a fear of getting into trouble, or not being reimbursed for expenses. In fact, the bigger State owned companies will tend to treat you like how fairandunbiased described. The guys at COOEC are definitely arseholes like that since they know they are the big dogs in the house, and sometimes you feel like they think they are the clients instead of contractors begging for work, even when I walk around with a couple 100 millions dollar contract and multiple others in the pipeline for bids. Their attitude kind of piss you off though, even if you are one that strictly operates between the lines.
The worst offenders in this are local arms of small to mid sized foreign companies setting up shop in China. They fully embrace the brown paper bag culture, are alot more liberal with cash and are not under strict corporate governance. You will get alot more than dinner on a trip to their factories.
