Views: 0 Author: Tonney Shao Publish Time: 2026-08-05 Origin: Abery Mold
In one sentence: In 2020 a young Spanish company we had been working with since 2018 — building KNX modules for European smart buildings — had to cancel a live mold project half-way through because of the Covid economic shock, and they asked if we would consider not collecting the €8,520 mold balance they still owed us; we said yes on the day they wrote, because the reason the project failed had nothing to do with them and nothing to do with us, and today, six years later, that same customer is one of the recognized names in European KNX and building automation, and one of our steady European accounts.
Item | Detail |
Customer | A Spanish OEM building KNX home and building automation products (identity withheld under NDA) |
Product family (from the mold project) | DIN-rail-mounted KNX control modules — precision white ABS/PC-blend enclosures with dense terminal apertures, ventilation slots, and standardized 35 mm DIN clip mounting |
Relationship start | 2018 |
The event | 2020: mid-project cancellation due to the Covid economic shock in Europe |
Outstanding balance at the moment of cancellation | €8,520 on completed mold work already sampled and approved |
Their request | Would we consider not collecting the balance, given the reason for the cancellation? |
Our answer | Yes — communicated the same day, in writing, no partial-payment counter |
Reasoning | The failure had nothing to do with the customer's execution and nothing to do with our tooling; asking a young company to carry the entire external-shock loss alone was not the kind of supplier we wanted to be |
Result (2020 → 2026) | Customer's business recovered post-Covid, grew into one of the recognized European KNX brands, has been placing new mold and production work with us regularly since |
Above: three of the KNX control-module enclosures we molded for the Spanish customer over the course of the relationship. The image is included with the customer's permission and shows the general enclosure family, not the specific 2020 canceled project.
I have already published three case studies on this site. Two are about what we do when things go well or when we make an engineering mistake — the stud finder rescue project and the Russian mold we remade for free. One is about what we do when a long-term customer's own business hits a wall — the American customer we kept through bankruptcy.
This one is about a fourth situation, and it is the situation I get asked about most often by European buyers evaluating whether to place their first mold with a Chinese supplier:
"What happens if the market moves against my product half-way through the mold build, and I need to cancel? Am I on the hook for the full balance regardless?"
Legally, in every mold contract we write, the answer is yes. Commercially, in real life, the answer depends on why the market moved against you — and on the kind of supplier you chose. This is a story about one of the times we chose to share the risk instead of enforce the contract.
Our customer is a Spanish company that was founded shortly before we started working with them in 2018. Their focus is European KNX and building-automation products — the kind of DIN-rail-mounted control modules, dimmers, actuators, and gateways that sit inside electrical cabinets in commercial and residential smart buildings across Europe. If you have ever looked inside a smart-building distribution board in Madrid or Barcelona, there is a good chance you have seen one of their products, even if you did not read the label.
The mold work we do for them is not glamorous but it is technically demanding:
Housing material: typically ABS/PC blends or PC-ABS with UL 94 flammability rating, specified for European electrical enclosure use
Dimensional tolerance: DIN-rail mounting (35 mm standard) is unforgiving — the clip geometry has to be within a few hundredths of a millimeter or the module will not seat correctly in a cabinet
Aperture density: the front and rear faces are covered in terminal-block openings, LED windows, push-button holes, and ventilation slots — every one of which is a potential source of flash, warpage, or mis-registration in a poorly designed mold
Volume profile: European KNX is a lower-volume, higher-mix market than US consumer tools — this means multi-cavity molds have to be dimensionally stable across long production runs with frequent color changes
Cosmetic standard: professional installers see these parts every day; visible parting lines, gate marks on visible faces, or inconsistent white shades get flagged immediately
By early 2020 we had already delivered several molds and production batches to this customer, and they were placing a new project — a family of modules requiring several new tools — that we started work on in the normal way.
I do not need to explain to anyone reading this in 2026 what 2020 looked like in Europe. Spain was one of the hardest-hit countries in the first Covid wave. Commercial construction slowed sharply, distributor orders were postponed, retail-facing installers stopped taking new bookings, and — for a young KNX manufacturer whose customers were mid-cycle installers and specifiers — several months of forward pipeline evaporated inside a few weeks.
By mid-2020 our customer had a straightforward problem: the mold project we were building for them was proceeding on schedule and on quality — the samples we had already delivered were approved — but the market their finished product was going to sell into no longer existed on the timeline they had planned for. Continuing the project meant paying for tooling that could not be productized into revenue for an unknown period. Cancelling it meant taking a full loss on the tool investment they had already made.
They were transparent with us. They wrote and explained the situation, showed us the state of their own downstream pipeline, and asked a specific question:
"Given that the reason for the cancellation is not related to product design, not related to your tooling quality, and not something either of us could have foreseen, would you be willing to consider not collecting the €8,520 remaining balance on this project?"
That balance was for mold work already completed. Under the terms of our written contract, they owed it. In every legally-standard reading of the situation, we were entitled to the full amount.
I want to explain the reasoning, because the reasoning is the whole point of publishing this case study.
One — the failure was genuinely external. This was not a customer whose product had failed in the market. It was not a customer whose design had turned out to be wrong. It was not a customer whose forecasting had been reckless. It was a competent, well-run young company that had done everything right on their side, and had run into a global public-health event no supplier chain in the world had planned for. When that is the honest description of a project cancellation, "enforce the balance" starts to look less like principle and more like taking advantage of bad timing.
Two — the amount was survivable for us and unsurvivable at scale for them. €8,520 was a real number for Abery Mold in 2020 — I am not going to pretend it was not. But it was survivable. For a young European KNX startup absorbing simultaneous cancellations across their own customer base, another supplier's balance demand at that moment was one of the things that could actually push them out of business. Asymmetric harm matters in these decisions.
Three — young European customers are not the same as long-established ones, and they need different treatment. Most of our long-term partners have been through multiple economic cycles. They have working capital. They have credit lines. A young company with two years of operating history does not. If we want long-term European customers, we have to be the kind of supplier who is realistic about the difference — and who is willing to absorb the extra risk of the early-stage phase of the relationship, on the understanding that the customer will remember it.
Four — the "shared-risk" principle only means anything when it costs you something. Every mold-maker website in China claims to be a "long-term partner" to their customers. That word is meaningless unless you can point to a moment where the supplier put their own money on the line to keep the partnership real. This was one of those moments. If we had refused the request, we could still have called ourselves a partner — but no one would have had a reason to believe it.
So we agreed. Written confirmation the same day, no counter-offer, no partial payment plan, no attempt to convert the balance into a "credit" against future orders (which is the standard Chinese-supplier way of turning a write-off into a soft receivable). Clean release.
The Spanish company survived the second half of 2020 and the harder months of 2021. As the European construction and building-automation market recovered, they came back and re-started the mold family they had originally cancelled — placing the order again, at full price, in 2022 or shortly after, once their own pipeline supported it.
Since 2020 they have grown into one of the recognized names in the European KNX and smart-building segment. Their product line has broadened. Their distribution has widened across several European markets. We have kept working with them the entire way through — on new tools, on production runs of the existing families shown above, and on the routine mold maintenance work that comes with a mature product line.
I want to be careful about one thing. The point of this story is not that "forgiving €8,520 in 2020 paid off in bigger orders since 2022." That framing would turn it into a transactional decision retold as a business hack, and it was not that. We would have made the same decision even if they had not survived Covid at all. The reason was in the situation itself, not in the outcome. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the only version of "shared risk" I trust.
European customers — especially newer ones building certified products for regulated European markets — carry a specific set of risks that US and Asian customers often do not:
Long product certification cycles (KNX Association certification, CE, RED, RoHS, REACH) that can stretch several months and can be delayed by external events
Distributor-and-installer-driven demand curves that are more sensitive to construction-cycle shocks than direct-to-consumer channels
Multi-country language and packaging requirements that add cost and inventory risk before revenue arrives
Standards that shift — EU regulatory environments update, and product SKUs sometimes need re-tooling mid-lifecycle
We take those risks seriously as a supplier, and we build them into how we behave. In practice, for European customers, that means:
We are willing to structure milestone-based payment schedules for well-defined mold projects, so cash outlay tracks certification and production readiness rather than upfront steel-cut
When an external event outside both parties' control disrupts a live project, we look for ways to share the shock rather than enforce the contract to the last euro
We do not treat two-year customers as "new customers" indefinitely; if the working relationship has been clean, we adjust risk terms accordingly
We keep judgment calls at the CEO level for anything above a defined threshold, including the specific decision described in this article
None of this is a formal policy document. It is a set of habits we have built up over 17 years, and I write it down here because European buyers reading this page deserve to know how we actually behave, not just what we quote.
If you are a Spanish, Italian, German, French, Nordic, or Benelux OEM evaluating whether to place your first mold with a Chinese supplier, the honest question you should ask us is not about our capacity or our steel grade. Those are table stakes. The honest question is:
"If a Covid-scale external event hits my product cycle mid-tooling, what will you do?"
The answer we give in this case study is the answer we would give you in a meeting. I would rather you evaluate us on that basis before you place an order than after.
If you want to have that conversation directly, my email is at the bottom of this page. I answer serious European RFQs personally.
No. This case study describes a specific decision made for a specific customer whose project cancellation was clearly caused by an external event outside their control (the Covid economic shock). We evaluate each cancellation individually on the cause of the cancellation, the customer's history with us, and the state of the tooling. We have both accepted and declined similar requests since.
Our standard structure is milestone-based: an initial deposit on PO acceptance, a payment at DFM sign-off, a payment at steel-cut, a payment at T1 sample approval, and a final balance before shipping the mold to Europe. We can adapt this for certified-product projects with longer regulatory cycles — please raise this in your initial RFQ.
We build enclosures across many electronics categories, and DIN-rail-mounted control modules for KNX and building-automation markets are one of the families we have been building continuously since 2018. Tolerances on the 35 mm DIN clip geometry, aperture registration on dense terminal faces, and UL/CE-relevant material qualification are the three areas we pay closest attention to for this category.
Yes. We sign mutual NDAs, and we routinely work under GDPR-consistent handling of customer product data. The Spanish customer in this case study is anonymized under exactly that kind of agreement.
Yes. For new European customers we frequently recommend starting with a single-cavity or two-cavity pilot mold on one representative part before scaling into a multi-tool program. This lowers your first-project risk and gives both sides a working reference before larger commitments.
Tonney Shao is the founder and CEO of Shenzhen Abery Mold & Plastics Co., Ltd., an ISO 9001-certified injection mold maker and plastic parts manufacturer serving automotive, consumer electronics, medical device, industrial equipment, and consumer goods customers worldwide. Abery has built more than 3,000 molds since 2009 and operates a tooling and molding facility in Shenzhen, China. Tonney personally reviews every material commercial decision described in the case studies on this site, and answers serious European RFQs personally.
Contact: tonney@a-mold.com · +86-13925214356
Case study published 5 August 2026. Customer identity, specific product SKUs, and the exact date of the 2020 cancellation withheld under a mutual non-disclosure agreement, with the customer's advance review and consent to publication. The image on this page is used with the customer's written permission and shows the general KNX enclosure family, not the specific 2020 canceled project. References to "the Covid economic shock" describe the general 2020 European market environment.
