Tradesparq makes finding suppliers in China less nightmarish

Brian Hager from Tradesparq.

We all know how China is like the world’s factory. Even an article from New York Times talks about the breathtaking speed and flexibility of Chinese factories in satisfying Apple’s manufacturing needs.

With literally thousands of suppliers and manufacturers to choose from, small and medium sized businesses have an issue with picking the right supplier and manufacturer.

Tradesparq plans to solve this issue. Brian Hager, co-founder of China-based Tradesparq, tell us more.

Kim Sia: Give us the background of Tradesparq, Brian.

Brian: Previously, Michael and I worked in GlobalSources.com for seven years. GlobalSources.com is a competitor of Alibaba.com — the site that does business directory listings of suppliers, manufacturers and vendors in China.

While we were in GlobalSources for seven years, we spent time visiting factories, sites, talking to suppliers, talking to buyers — people from Kmart, Walmart, small importers, distributors and many others.

At the same time, we were paying attention to the technology space.

Business directory listings online were not meeting the manufacturers’ need. The prospects for the manufacturers are not ideal in terms of price, response and ROI. One major reason of this mismatch is due to the lack of filtering.

On the buyer side, many buyers have a common complaint, “Oh I cannot do due diligence on three thousands suppliers. Isn’t there anyway you can minimize this?”

Over the seven years spent connecting with suppliers and buyers, we saw how the social networks were taking the world by storm, so we think that a B2B social network would work well with a B2B marketplace.

Hence we came up with Tradesparq.

KimSia: One thing I really got from your pitch was how Tradesparq was like LinkedIn meets Alibaba. Could you tell us more about this?

Brian: I am glad that you got that from our pitch because we are quite concerned that the audience won’t get this. So we tried very hard to portray the buyer’s perspective within the six minute time limit.