Real Manufacturer or a Middleman? How to Tell Before You Pay a Deposit

Quick answer. You can tell a Chinese factory from a well-presented trading company in about forty minutes, without visiting, using eight checks that are each answerable yes or no. The three decisive ones are the registered scope of business, the pollutant discharge permit, and whether the contract, the invoice and the bank account name the same legal entity. None of the eight checks is a single silver bullet, and four of them are routinely misread — which is why buyers keep paying deposits to companies that subcontracted the order the day after signing.

Who this guide is for — and what it does not do

This is for a buyer who has a shortlist of two to five Chinese underwear suppliers and needs to decide which one to put a deposit behind. It assumes you are sourcing OEM or private-label garments — briefs, boxers, sleepwear, bralettes — at volumes between roughly 1,000 and 50,000 pieces per style, and that you will never get on a plane to verify anyone in person.

It is not a list of “ten traits of a good supplier”. Those lists read well and decide nothing, because every trait on them is self-reported. This guide is about evidence you can obtain without the supplier’s permission, plus a small number of questions where the answer is informative whether it is true or false.

It also does not claim that a trading company is the wrong answer. Roughly half of the underwear shipped out of Fujian province is exported through companies that own no sewing machines, and some of them are better partners than the factory down the road. What matters is that you know which one you are dealing with before the deposit clears, not after the first quality dispute. If you are still at the stage of building a candidate list rather than testing one, start with our 2026 buyer’s guide to choosing an underwear manufacturer and come back here to run the checks.

Why this question is settled before you ever get a quotation

Buyers tend to think of supplier verification as the last step — you find candidates, you collect prices, you pick one, then you check it. The order is backwards in practice, because the two failure modes you are trying to avoid both happen earlier than the quotation:

• You ask a trading company to quote a factory’s capability, and it quotes anyway. A firm with no dyeing line will happily quote you a piece-dyed cotton programme, then shop it out to a factory that can do it. The price is real; the process control you thought you were buying is not.
• You shortlist a supplier whose own name appears nowhere in the production record. This is fine — until a defect batch shows up and the entity that signed your contract has no leverage over the entity that made the goods.

Both are identity problems, not quality problems, and both are cheap to detect early. The expensive version is discovering them at the pre-shipment inspection, when your moulds, your labels and your packaging have already been consumed.

The eight checks, ordered from cheapest to most invasive

The order matters. Checks 1 to 5 cost you nothing but a browser and are pure public records — the supplier does not know you looked. Checks 6 to 8 involve asking, and the way a supplier handles being asked is itself data.

1. Registered scope of business — the field most buyers never open

Every Chinese company holds a business licence (营业执照) carrying a unified social credit code (统一社会信用代码) — 18 characters that identify one and only one legal entity. That code resolves, in the public corporate registry, to a registration record that includes a field almost nobody reads: scope of business (经营范围).

Since the 2022 revision of the registration rules, this field is split into general items (一般项目) and licensed items (许可项目). What you are looking for:

• Points to a factory: licensed or general items containing 服装制造 (garment manufacturing), 服饰制造, 针织或钩针编织物织造 (knitted or crocheted fabric manufacture), 印染加工 (dyeing and printing), 针织或钩针编织品制造.
• Points to an intermediary: 服装服饰批发 (wholesale of garments), 服装服饰零售, 货物进出口 (import and export of goods), 技术进出口, 供应链管理服务 (supply chain management), 企业管理咨询.

A trading company’s scope frequently reads like a shopping list of unrelated activities — this is normal and not a red flag by itself, but it does mean “服装制造” is absent. Conversely, a factory’s scope is often narrow and even dull: three or four manufacturing items and nothing else.

The registry is operated by China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (市场监管总局) and is reachable at samr.gov.cn; the search front end is the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System. If you have the credit code, an authorised buyer can also pull the licence from the official electronic business licence mini-program. Ask for the code in the first email — a supplier who cannot produce 18 digits for their own company is telling you something already.

2. Registered address against the place the goods actually come from

Registration addresses in China are descriptive. Manufacturing sites sit in 工业区 (industrial zones), 产业园 (industrial parks) or named villages in a textile township; trading offices sit in 商务中心 (business centres), 写字楼 (office towers) or residential compounds converted to offices.

Cross-check the registered address against the loading address your supplier gives for collection, and against satellite imagery. A garment plant that handles 100,000 pieces a month needs somewhere for containers to stand — if the satellite view shows a nine-storey office building and a car park, and the supplier says the whole order ships from there, at least one of those statements is imprecise.

Also worth noting: it is entirely normal for the registered address of a trading company to be an office, and entirely normal for a factory’s registered address to be a much older building than its actual plant. The manoeuvre to watch for is the reverse — a bright new “factory” address that turns out to be a shared industrial incubator rented by the week.

3. The pollutant discharge permit — the hardest single signal in this list

Dyeing, washing, bleaching, mercerising and heat-setting consume water and produce effluent. Under China’s Regulations on the Administration of Pollutant Discharge Permits, in force since 1 March 2021, facilities carrying out these wet processes must hold a pollutant discharge permit (排污许可证), which is entered in a national public database searchable at permit.mee.gov.cn.

This produces a clean, falsifiable test:

Read the third row carefully. A cutting-and-sewing plant that sends fabric out to a dyehouse is completely normal. The failure mode is a company that claims the dyehouse as its own, which is a claim the public record can settle in two minutes. This is the check that most often converts “we are a vertically integrated manufacturer” into “we manage a network”, and it is the reason this one is worth running before any conversation about price.

4. Customs registration — the check most buyers get backwards

Chinese exporters that handle their own shipments register with Customs as consignors or consignees (进出口货物收发货人) and receive a ten-digit registration code. That registration is public, and it is easy to look up.

The trap is the inference. Most buyers assume a real factory will obviously hold export registration, and that a supplier without it must be an intermediary. In practice:

• A large share of genuine, capable garment factories in Fujian and Guangdong have no customs registration at all. They sell FOB to a trading company and never touch an export declaration.
• A trading company always has export capability, by definition — that is the service it sells.

So the check runs almost the other way round: the absence of customs registration is weak evidence for or against anything, while a supplier that presents itself as a factory and handles your export under its own name is either genuinely integrated or is a trading arm acting as an export agent for the plant. Ask which, and listen to whether the answer arrives without hesitation.

Public credit information on customs-registered enterprises, and on companies subject to enforcement, is also searchable through the Supreme People’s Court enforcement database at zxgk.court.gov.cn — useful for the second-order question of whether the entity you are about to pay has unpaid judgments against it.

5. Insured headcount in the annual report

Chinese companies file an annual report (年度报告) that includes the number of employees covered by urban employee basic pension insurance (城镇职工基本养老保险参保人数). This number is public alongside the registration record.

Use it as a magnitude test, not a precise headcount:

• A plant running six sewing lines at 40 machines each is looking at several hundred insured workers.
• A sourcing office with a merchandising team, a QC team and finance is looking at single digits to low tens.

Two honest caveats. First, garment factories in China use significant amounts of dispatched and outsourced labour, so insured headcount understates who is actually on the floor. Second, a large insured headcount does not prove the people are doing what you think they are doing. The value of the number is that a “factory” claiming 300 workers while insuring 6 people requires an explanation, and the explanation is usually informative.

6. A live walk-through, on a specific order

At some point you have to ask. The request that separates suppliers most cleanly is not “can I see your factory” — everyone says yes to that — but:

“Can we do a live video call this week, and can you walk me through the lines currently running my style — the cutting table with my fabric, the sewing line, and the final inspection station?”

What you are reading is not the factory. It is the response:

• Accepts, proposes a time, does it live within the week, and can show your actual fabric or your label. Strong.
• Accepts a call, but only in the showroom or the office. Common with trading companies; not disqualifying, but note it.
• Sends a video file instead, or says the factory does not allow photography. The second half is sometimes true — some plants genuinely prohibit cameras. Ask instead for a live call where the camera stays on the goods, not the building. Refusal of that is informative.

Do not accept a factory tour video with a music bed. Recorded footage proves that a camera was once in a building that may or may not be related to your order.

7. Whether the contract, the invoice and the bank account name the same entity

This check requires no cooperation from the supplier at all, and it is the one most directly tied to your money. Three documents, one question each:

• Who is the seller on the proforma invoice? Full legal name, and the credit code behind it.
• Who is the beneficiary on the bank details? In China the account name must match the registered company name — the central bank does not permit mismatched corporate accounts. A beneficiary that differs from the PI seller means a third party is in the payment chain.
• Who signs the sales contract?

If all three name the same credit code, you know exactly whom you are buying from, even if that entity is a trading company. If they diverge, the divergent party is your actual counterparty for at least part of the transaction, and you should know why before the deposit leaves.

The single most common version of this in practice is a Hong Kong or offshore entity collecting payment while the mainland company issues the documents. That structure is legal, widespread, and usually disclosed. The problem is the undisclosed version, where the offshore name appears for the first time on the banking screen after you have already agreed a price with someone else.

8. Order-specific production records

Paper is the cheapest proof of presence. Ask for the documents that a factory generates whether or not a buyer ever asks:

The test that makes this hard to fake: ask for the records for your order, and specify one detail only your order has — a colour reference, a label position, a size break. A factory can produce it, because it exists. An intermediary that has not been back to the plant since the order was placed will produce a template, or produce nothing, or produce a document for a different customer’s order with the details left off.

The scoring table: turning eight answers into a decision

No single check should decide this. Score them, then look at the shape of the answer.

How to read the total. Five or more of the eight pointing the same way is a reliable read. Check 4 should be treated as noise. Checks 1, 3, 7 and 8 are objective — they come from public records or your own paperwork. Checks 2, 5 and 6 involve judgement, and check 6 is the only one a supplier can consciously manage, which is exactly why the manner of the answer carries as much weight as the answer.

What a mixed result usually means. Checks 1, 3 and 8 pointing to a factory while 7 points elsewhere is the classic structure problem: the plant is real, but you are contracting with a party that does not control it. That is a specific, manageable risk — it becomes dangerous only when nobody has told you.

The honest part: a middleman is not a defect

Everything above is written to help you identify what you are buying from. It is not written to steer you towards an owner-operated plant, because for a large share of orders that is the worse choice.

What a competent intermediary actually does

• Capacity allocation. A single plant has a physical ceiling and a peak season. A company working across several lines can move your repeat order to whichever partner has a gap, which is the difference between shipping in 35 days and shipping in 90. The volume at stake is not marginal: China’s apparel and textile export flows, tracked in the UN Comtrade database, run to tens of billions of dollars a year, and a large share of it moves through non-manufacturing exporters.
• Small and mixed orders. Factories price in the cost of switching lines. A coordinator that bundles three styles across two plants can often accept a smaller first order than either plant would quote on its own.
• Compliance translation. Knowing which tests your market requires, which laboratory to use, and how to read the report that comes back is a separate skill from sewing, and it is the one most often missing inside a small plant.
• Consequence in your language. When something goes wrong at 2 a.m. your time, the entity that answers is the one that can actually reach the production floor.

How to tell a good intermediary from a bad one

The distinction is not whether the goods are subcontracted. It is whether the supplier is willing to be specific about the subcontracting. Four questions sort most of them:

1. “Which factory will physically make this order, and can I know its name?” A good coordinator names the plant or explains precisely why it cannot. A bad one says “our own factories” for everything.
2. “If I visit, will you take me to that plant?” Real partners arrange this. The evasive answers are all variants of “the factory does not accept visitors”, which is usually about the coordinator, not the factory.
3. “Who signs the quality claim if we find a defect at destination?” The answer must be the entity on your contract. If it is not, you have a contract with someone who has no authority over the goods.
4. “What is the profit line on this order?” Nobody answers this exactly, but a supplier that will discuss its margin structure (fabrics, making charge, testing, freight) is a different animal from one that treats the price as a magic number.

Where we sit, stated plainly

It would be strange to write this page without applying it to ourselves.

Xiamen Unitex Trade Co., Ltd. is a sourcing and supply-chain management company. We are not a manufacturer and we do not describe ourselves as one. The garments buyers receive from us are made by our partner factories, which are the manufacturers of those goods; they hold the certifications and the production permits, not us. We hold the merchandising, the QC programme, the compliance file and the relationship with your brand.

So on the eight checks above, we score the way a well-run intermediary should: check 1 shows wholesale and import/export rather than manufacturing; check 3 resolves to our partner factories rather than to us; check 7 shows one credit code throughout, because our proforma invoice, our contract and our bank beneficiary are all the same Xiamen entity; and check 6 is the one we would encourage you to run hardest, because we can name the plants and take you through the line that is running your style.

If your order genuinely requires contracting with the plant itself — for example if your compliance file must name the manufacturing site as the legal producer — that is a legitimate reason to choose differently, and it is better to establish it now than halfway through a production run.

Questions to send, word for word

These are written to be copied into an email as they are. The wording matters less than the fact that they are specific enough to be answered badly.

• “What is your 18-digit unified social credit code, so we can confirm the registered entity?”
• “Does your registered scope of business include 服装制造 (garment manufacturing)? If the work is done by partner factories, can you tell us which ones?”
• “If any dyeing, washing or finishing is done in-house, what is your pollutant discharge permit number?”
• “Which legal entity will appear as seller on the proforma invoice, and is the bank beneficiary the same company name?”
• “Can we schedule a live video call in the next five working days, and can you show the cutting table holding our fabric?”
• “Please send the cutting sheet and the needle detection record for our order once production starts.”
• “If we find a defect at destination, which entity is liable under the contract we sign?”

Seven questions, no accusation in any of them, and between them they will tell you more than a factory audit video narrated by the sales manager.

Compliance and verification

The checks above lean on public records and on standard quality evidence rather than on the supplier’s own claims. The corresponding reference points:

• Entity identity — the unified social credit code system administered by China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (samr.gov.cn), and the corporate credit publicity system it operates. US buyers looking for a country-level orientation on Chinese commercial practice can use the China Country Commercial Guide published by the US Commercial Service.
• Environmental permits — pollutant discharge permits under the Regulations on the Administration of Pollutant Discharge Permits (2021), searchable nationally at permit.mee.gov.cn.
• Enforcement history — the Supreme People’s Court enforcement information database (zxgk.court.gov.cn).
• Social compliance — amfori BSCI audits, which are held by the manufacturing site, not by the sourcing company acting for it. Verify the audit, not the logo.
• Chemical compliance — OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certificates are issued to an article and a licence holder; the holder can be checked by certificate number through the issuing body’s label check tool.
• Inspection — pre-shipment inspection to a documented sampling plan, normally AQL 2.5 for major and 4.0 for minor defects under the sampling scheme in ISO 2859-1, with a zero-tolerance rule for critical defects. Our own walk-through of how to read an inspection report covers the tables.
• Commercial terms — the International Chamber of Commerce publishes the Incoterms rules that define where risk passes, and GS1 standards cover the product identifiers that make a shipment traceable at carton level.

None of these is a substitute for the other. A credible certificate from a supplier that fails checks 1, 3 and 7 is a certificate for a different company’s goods. The same logic applies to the certification question as a whole: what a buyer is really buying is the link between the certificate and the entity that produced the goods.

Next step

Run checks 1, 2, 3 and 7 on your shortlist today — they take about ten minutes each and require no contact with the supplier. Keep the one or two survivors, then send the seven questions above. If you would rather compare notes first, tell us the market, the styles and the volume you are working with, and we will tell you plainly whether your order is a better fit for a plant contracting directly or for a sourcing partner managing the process on your behalf. The product categories we run and our QC process are the two pages worth reading next, and the question of who absorbs the cost of a middle layer is covered separately.

Published: 2026-10-10 · Xiamen Unitex Trade Co., Ltd. — OEM & ODM underwear sourcing partner

Unitex Underwear (Xiamen Unitex Trade Co., Ltd.) — OEM/ODM underwear sourcing and supply-chain partner in Xiamen, China; in the trade since 2009, incorporated in 2013. Based in the Xiamen–Quanzhou–Jinjiang knitwear cluster, Fujian Province, south-east China.