I have some insight into that since I’ve spent much of my career dealing with Silicon Valley suppliers and various Asian suppliers, excluding Japan, which has a more Western mindset.
Western business philosophy focuses on value, while Asian business philosophy focuses exclusively on the lowest price. For example, an Asian supplier once tried to convince me that their product, 40% cheaper than Japanese competitors, was a better buy. Although cheaper, this savings represented less than 1% of my total system BOM. Saving less than $5 per system for a brand of unknown origin would have raised too many questions about my overall system quality by customers. The supplier couldn’t understand the concept of value over price and dismissed my concerns, so I ended the discussion.
This is why I initially found Bambu refreshing. They defied the typical Asian focus on low price by offering value, at least at the beginning. However, this changed once they started having issues. Now, we see the same Asian “cheap” approach to customer service while trying to pretend to be like Apple. What Apple and many Japanese companies such as Sony understand is that branding and customer loyalty are earned. I believe this is one reason why Prusa knockoffs have not yet been able to unseat Prusa, even though their products charge a premium despite Prusa’s stumble in the launch of their MK4 with the absence of the input shaping feature.
