Insights
Practical perspectives on system architecture, supplier strategy, and navigating the China question — for hardware and industrial founders.
Most hardware founders discover their Chinese supplier dependency too late — when a component goes EOL, a geopolitical shock hits, or a quality failure forces a redesign. The root cause is almost never procurement. It is architecture.
German Mittelstand companies hear about AI constantly. Most are sceptical — and rightly so. The question is not whether AI can help, but where it creates measurable, bounded value and where it introduces risk you cannot afford.
System architecture shapes supplier flexibility long before procurement gets involved. This article explores how hardware choices, software ecosystems, deployment models, compliance constraints, and other architectural decisions can quietly create supplier lock-in over time.
Chinese component vendors operate a two-tier documentation system. The English datasheet is the marketing version. The real technical reference — the one with the register maps, the undocumented features, and the application notes — is in Mandarin.
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