Supplier wants 6% for materials? Ask which material
Ask which material. In China's August producer price figures, what factories paid for nonferrous metals and cables was 19.8 per cent higher than a year earlier; what they paid for ferrous metals was 0.3 per cent higher. A supplier building anything with copper in it — a welding set, a grinder motor, a cable assembly, brass fittings — can show you exactly where the increase comes from. A supplier of steel hand tools cannot: the metal products line those come off rose 1.6 per cent at the factory gate over the same year.
A flat “raw material adjustment” of 5 or 6 per cent across a mixed order is therefore two conversations wearing one number. Split the order and answer them separately.
The figures to quote back
These are the input lines the National Bureau of Statistics publishes with the headline, from its release of 10 September. They are what Chinese industry pays, not what it charges, which is why a supplier will reach for them.
| What factories buy | Year on year | Month on month |
|---|---|---|
| Nonferrous metals and cables | +19.8% | +0.8% |
| Fuel and power | +9.8% | +1.4% |
| Raw chemical materials | +9.5% | −0.4% |
| Ferrous metals | +0.3% | −0.6% |
| Building materials and non-metals | −3.2% | flat |
The headline producer price index rose 3.8 per cent and the purchasing price index 5.8 per cent, and neither of those is your number either. The 5.8 is an average across everything Chinese industry buys, weighted by what industry buys most of, and the thing doing the work inside it is copper. On the output side the same release puts the smelting and pressing of non-ferrous metals up 20.8 per cent at the gate and the smelting and pressing of ferrous metals down 0.3 per cent.
So: put copper-content items on their own line with the metal component shown separately, so that it can come down again when the metal does. Hold steel-content items to the figure the statistics office gives for steel, which is low single digits, not high. And ask any factory quoting the purchasing index against a steel product whose bill it is quoting.
What moves when the price does not
The specification. Consumer goods at the Chinese factory gate fell 0.5 per cent on the year, and durable consumer goods — the line that covers hand tools and anything else shipping in a retail box — rose 1.2 per cent. A factory selling into a market that shops on headline price does not raise the headline price. It thins the plating, drops a grade of steel, shortens the copper in a winding, swaps the bearing. None of that shows up in any index, and all of it shows up on a bench six months later.
Two things protect you, and both go on the purchase order rather than into a message thread. Keep a golden sample of the last accepted batch and check the new arrival against it. And write the specification down in the terms a factory can be held to: plating thickness in microns, steel grade by designation, motor winding material, cable cross-section. A supplier who has agreed a 6 per cent increase and then quietly recovers it in the material is charging you twice.
None of this makes a supplier an adversary. It makes the increase checkable, which is what a supplier with a genuine copper bill actually wants, because it lets them show the bill instead of arguing about a percentage.
If a China-sourced line on your cost sheet has moved and you want it checked against the component that actually moved, ask Vesprr Tools.
Sources
- National Bureau of Statistics of China, 10 September 2026: Industrial Producer Price Indexes in August 2026 — every index above, the purchasing price lines year on year and month on month, the industry table for metal products and for the smelting and pressing of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, and the consumer and durable consumer goods figures.
- Vesprr Tools catalogue: angle grinders and socket sets, the two halves of the split above.