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byko3y
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phlogiston, no, there is no single manufacturer/distributor in china. I was answering to your argument about products range, while it is true that
it's much simplier to find an overprised item from sigma rather than looking for a chinese manufacturer/reseller.
http://www.advtechind.com/
http://en.reagent.com.cn/products.asp (they sell palladium nitrate for 290 yuan/1 g).
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The Volatile Chemist
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Sigma Aldrich is hilarious. I totally want to be a supplier to them sometime 
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chemrox
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They've been taken over by lawyers.
"When you let the dumbasses vote you end up with populism followed by autocracy and getting back is a bitch." Plato (sort of)
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Dr.Bob
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No you don't, they pay their suppliers very little, and then repackage and mark up. But nowadays, it is much easier to find the small companies that
do real chemistry still on the web, so you don't need a Sigma-Aldrich to do that for you as much. But for some customers, they want to be able to
click and order with no effort. That is who they cater to. That is why the don't bother with individuals and smaller clients, they are just not
profitable customers for the risks.
But there are still 100's of small chemicals companies, most are still hard to find (many on purpose), but not all, and many are happier to sell to
you than Aldrich, which will buy a lot for a little. They often mark up chemicals by 10 fold from what they paid, but that does allow them to buy,
analyze, repackage and store them so they are ready when you need them. Many small companies don't keep large inventoried, if any.
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RareEarth
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Sigma's marketing plan is actually quite smart. They are targeting a very narrow portion of the Chemistry market, in the US, or the other countries
they are in. That portion of the market being research groups with a lot of money to spend, with little time to waste, and the willingness to pay
enormous amounts if it means they can get their orders near-overnight. No business concerned in their right mind would use Sigma as their supplier for
specialty chemicals.
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Tsjerk
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Pretty good description RareEarth, for every market a supplier.
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ziqquratu
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Aldrich is most certainly expensive... my favourite example, however, is a piece of hardware.
Check out items Z178764 and Z508845. It may vary in other countries, but here in Australia they want AU$90.00 for a 12.5" claw hammer, and AU$52.50
for a 10" ball-pein hammer, respectively. This is actually a good price, however - when I first heard about the hammer thing a year or two ago, they
wanted AU$125 for the claw hammer...
Ultimately, Aldrich has the advantage of range, particularly in countries (like Australia) where shipping dangerous goods from alternative suppliers
can be prohibitive. They're also familiar - if you want to know if a chemical can be bought, the first place anyone thinks to check is Aldrich. And,
to be fair, they are often competitive with some of the other major suppliers - Merck or the companies Thermo represents, for example. But there are a
multitude of smaller suppliers who can absolutely bury them on price, often even when you factor in the cost of shipping. I recall one instance when
we needed about 1kg of EDC, a water soluble peptide coupling reagent. From Aldrich, this would have cost on the order of $5000; but a bit of searching
came up with a US-based supplier, who had 5kg to us within a week for only a few hundred dollars.
There's also the quality issue, as some others have noted. For metal compounds, I always buy from Strem if possible - and Aldrich is always last on my
list of favoured suppliers. Not only are Strem often cheaper (as noted for palladium acetate), the quality is so much better. If you look around the
web, you'll see some older discussions about palladium tetrakis(triphenylphosphine). It's meant to be really nice yellow crystals; for many, many
years Aldrich provided a dirty red-brown powder, which was of variable activity in many reactions. I'm told that their material has improved in recent
years, but a lot of labs still refuse to buy it from them.
I think another factor often comes from University purchasing agreements - often, institutions will sign deals with big suppliers like Aldrich,
getting free shipping or small discounts in return for insisting that researchers only buy from those companies (unless a product is unavailable).
Which explains the hammers - if your department will only reimburse for purchases from Aldrich, and it's a choice between money coming out of your
grant or your salary, then you might just buy the $90 hammer instead of the $10 one from the hardware store...
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byko3y
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"institutions will sign deals with big suppliers like Aldrich, getting free shipping or small discounts" - I hope we all realize that the discount
doesn't stay close to the excessive price of goods. The reason is pretty much political, it's all about supporting allied institutions. There are no
open markets, never been and they will never exist.
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BromicAcid
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Lots of speculation here. Interestingly enough I believe the sales from the catalog business may no longer be the largest portion o the revenue.
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AvBaeyer
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From RareEarth:
"No business concerned in their right mind would use Sigma as their supplier for specialty chemicals. "
Not true. I have worked in discovery research and development for companies big(very) and small for whom Aldrich and Sigma have always been first
choice suppliers. The price of chemicals from Aldrich is miniscule compared to the other costs of running a chemistry research group (salaries,
benefits, capital equipment costs and support, building operational costs, etc.) In the last company I worked for I had a departmental budget of about
$10 million for about 45 chemist and the chemical costs, almost all from Aldrich, were less than $300K. This included supplies for a scale-up group.
So despite what people here say about Aldrich's prices (which are high) they are lost in the roundoff when looking at an overall departmental budget.
What killed us were software licenses and instrument service contracts. Just getting access to SciFinder cost over $300K per year. The license costs
for our computational chemistry was about $100K and for our database system it was also about $100K per year. The average salary +benefits +overhead
per chemist was about $200K per year. My point here is chemical prices do not really matter in an industrial research setting.
AvB
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byko3y
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AvBaeyer, nice catch, I can agree with you, but I would like to clarify some things.
Researches in US/EU cost much more than tthose in china/russia/others. The same applies to electronics/IT: most electronical devices are made in china
or maybe some neighbouring countries (Taiwan), because people is US/EU need a lot of money, while their skills don't differ much from that of chinese.
In china you can hire an experienced chemical researcher (ph.d. 3+ years) for 1000-2000$. Same applies to chemical suppliers.
I'm just trying to say that the r&d projects you work for belong to the case when someone just needs to through away a lot of money, because they
have those money and need to spend them. And that is the case of huge chemical companies and governments. You can't hold the money - you need them to
work, otherwise national industry/economy will cease.
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RareEarth
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AyBaeyer, that's exactly what I was talking about, high budget research groups with a lot of money to spend, because generally their research efforts
will turn into multimillion dollar industrial up-scaled processes.
This is not the majority of businesses. What you described classifies maybe 1% of all businesses that even do any sort of chemistry-related work. The
majority of businesses that exists do not have free 10 million dollar budgets they can just dump into research. To even have that requires the company
have significantly more than that in fluid cash. You're talking about the upper-echelon there.
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Tsjerk
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@byko3y: Are you kidding? 1000-2000$? Per month you mean? Without taxes? If everything you are saying would be true, then why is there still any
research done in EU/USA?
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byko3y
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Tsjerk, If all the industries moved to other countries, than US and EU would become 2nd-3rd world country. For this reason industrialists try to keep
money within their country.
They create image of US being the only country capable of effective production and research, thus the best researchers and managers all over the globe
try to move into US, and when everybody's efford is applied to some any industry - that industry begans to grow and succeed.
For example, did you know that actually south korean researchers suck? I read a lot of their researches, and they are pretty much useless, mindless,
being performed to use money they are given, like in iran or india. The question is: why is south korea a small country having a good chemical
industry, while india and iran have relatively small chemical industry and having the same shitty reserchers?
The reason is political, and the mechanism is similar to that of hong kong or europe: the region is given with markets, it is helped to create its
industry, just to show that it's better to be loyal to western politics. China was driven as an opposition to russia, and it is still stays
independently despite the fact it has a huge border with russia (compare to US-canada, or germany-france).
So, answering your question "why is there still any research done in EU/USA?" - to keep high tech industry within the region, while trying to supress
industries of other countries, to create an image via mass media that it's your destiny to buy goods made in US/EU, so in the end people in the 3rd
world countries will buy your goods selling their asses, because they've got no such goods.
There's a nice example in the nearest past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars , when chinese were practically enslaved by selling them refined opium and textile made in the western
countries. Since that time there's death penalty in China for selling drugs.
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phlogiston
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byko3y, Governments may have such motives, but companies don't. If they can beat their competitor by reducing salary costs a thousandfold by moving a
research lab to China, they are not going to care about politics or national pride.
In fact, many large companies already have some research labs and production facilities in China or in other countries where labour is cheap. They
know exactly what the relative costs/benefits are and still have not moved all their activities there, so I think it is less beneficial to do so than
you think. Either it costs much more or they can't do there what are doing in labs located in 1st world countries.
-----
"If a rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down, that's not my concern said Wernher von Braun" - Tom Lehrer |
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byko3y
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The government and transnational companies is the same. When you are a top player, then either referee plays for your team or you will lose.
Yes, they don't care about national pride, they care about their power only. Just like any government does.
As you may know, a lot of plants for producing computer parts are located not exactly in china, but in Taiwan.
"They know exactly what the relative costs/benefits are and still have not moved all their activities there" because they know, that they need to pay
customs duty, but even when they have paid transportation price and the duty, they find that a lot of production still is viable in china. This is how
expensive it is in the 1st world countries.
Btw, I'm working for a company in a large capital, however I live in a small town in another country. I can't work for the clients directly, because
nobody will trust foreigner from a poor country. For this reason a lot of companies have their r&d in 1st countries while production in the 3rd.
But I've already mentioned Schott Duran, which have no economical reason to exist, because any manufacturer even in a poor european country can do the
same glass.
Obviously, there's some freedom in actions of companies, but there's also a huge force that driving all those companies in one direction, which is
comparable to the profit-based force. Transnational companies = governments is this political force, keeping sigma, schott duran alive, and making
germany-france-britain 1st world countries for no economical reason.
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Tsjerk
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Usually I would draw the line a bit earlier, but for me the ''aluminium head'' is drawn right now. Good luck with not ordering from Sigma!
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The Volatile Chemist
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What do you mean? There are plenty of small and midsized companies which will supply most things a chemist needs. GFS Chemicals nearby where I live
seems to have a very large catalog, and they're only one company.
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zed
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Hnuh? Quality?
In the past, I purchased things from Aldrich, that arrived looking like dreck. No one else offered the products. So, it was.... take it or leave
it.
I never thought they were especially expensive. Sometimes, they were downright reasonable, in fact. But, you gotta pick your spots. If you like the
price, buy it. If you don't like the price, don't buy it.
If Aldrich wants a lot of money, but no-one else in the world is offering the object of your desire for sale, and it isn't easy to make, you just have
to bite the pillow.
[Edited on 28-8-2015 by zed]
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Zephyr
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Interesting motto...
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Little_Ghost_again
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Wouldnt it be a good idea for a sticky thread to list small special companies that are good value?
I have alot of trouble finding small suppliers of some things.
Dont ask me, I only know enough to be dangerous
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The Volatile Chemist
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Yes, that'd be a good idea. Super - nice to have you around again little ghost! Where on the forum did you explain why you left? I don't want to make
you repost it.
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byko3y
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Nice idea, I would be glad to share my suppliers situated in the fucking Ukraine.
Let's also share information about suppliers who sell listed chemicals.
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pepsimax
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Yeah that might be YOUR price. (ie not a customer - I presume, sorry if you are)
5L of HPLC absolute ethanol (300-500GBP at least last time I looked)
50GBP. Much better.
I don't have an account by the way, but a friend does. That's his price. He works for a large pharma company and is extremely qualified.
Out of interest I typed LSD - 1g of the tatrate salt appeared to be about 70GBP if I read it correctly. That's a pretty good deal in anyones book.
[Edited on 31-8-2015 by pepsimax]
[Edited on 31-8-2015 by pepsimax]
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The Volatile Chemist
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Not into listed chems in any way, but that is a lot, right? The threshold for noticeable effect is very low.
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