Asking for a discount is not negotiating. A supplier who concedes five per cent without justification will take it back elsewhere: on packaging, on freight, on material grade, or on the priority your order gets once their book is full.
We work on the cost structure. How much material per kilo, what machine hourly rate, what real cycle time, what scrap rate, what margin. Walking into the meeting with that breakdown changes the nature of the conversation: it is no longer about an arbitrary percentage but about the specific line that is too high, and why.
The second lever is the alternative. Negotiating without a credible fallback is polite asking. So we always keep at least one genuinely available second source, which shifts the balance of power without ever having to say so.
Finally, the contract. The painful points are rarely price: they are the raw-material indexation clause, ownership and location of tooling, genuinely enforceable late-delivery penalties, notice period, safety stock, and exit conditions. We draft or have those clauses reviewed before signature, under the law applicable in the supplier’s country.
What you receive
- Price decomposition (material, labour, machine, margin)
- Market benchmark and evidenced target price
- Leading or supporting the negotiation itself
- Key clauses: price revision, penalties, tooling, confidentiality, exit
- Framework agreement or multi-year price deal
