EXW, FOB or CIF: What Your Machine Quote Actually Includes

EXW means the machine, ready at the factory door, and nothing else. Not freight, not insurance, not import duty, not delivery to your address. It is the single most common source of confusion when buying equipment from China, and it is why two quotes that look $1,000 apart can cost the same landed. This is the plain-English version of the three terms you will actually be quoted, what each one includes, and how to compare them without getting caught.

We quote EXW Guangzhou on our published prices, so read this as a factory explaining its own terms. The goal is that the number in your business case is the number you will really spend.

The three terms, in order of how much they include

Read the bottom three rows twice. No standard term in this list gets the machine to your door with the taxes paid. Even CIF stops at the destination port, and buyers who assume otherwise meet the gap at customs. If you want a true door-to-door number, that is a different arrangement and you have to ask for it explicitly.

Why factories quote EXW

Not to hide costs, though it can feel that way. Freight out of China swings with destination, season, container availability and how much you are shipping, so a factory that baked freight into one price would overcharge most buyers and lose money on the rest. Quoting the machine alone keeps the number honest and lets you compare factories on the thing they actually control. The corollary is the part to internalize: an EXW price is never the amount you will spend, and any plan built on it alone is short by a real margin.

Which term to ask for

If this is your first machine and you have no freight forwarder, take a quote that includes shipping even if the headline is higher, because the alternative is learning customs brokerage on a deadline. If you have a forwarder, or you are shipping more than one machine, EXW or FOB usually lands cheaper: you control the freight and capture the volume discount instead of paying someone else's version of it. The saving grows fast with quantity, which is why our distributor partners taking 30 to 80 machines a month never want freight in the quote.

How to compare two quotes honestly

Put both on the same basis before you compare a single digit. Ask each seller for the same thing: machine price, the Incoterm, the port, estimated freight to your port, and the commodity code they use for customs. Then add your own duty rate and inland delivery. Two quotes only mean something once they end at the same place. A factory that cannot tell you the commodity code or the crate dimensions has not shipped to your market often, which is itself worth knowing.

Our numbers, so the example is concrete

Every price in our published list is EXW Guangzhou. As a planning figure, add roughly 15 to 30 percent for a single machine into a Western market to cover freight, duty and local delivery, and expect that percentage to drop sharply per unit once machines travel together. Send us the machine and the destination city and we will come back with a landed estimate rather than leaving you to guess. The wider commercial sequence, deposit through balance, is in how paying a factory in China works.