European vision camera manufacturers can’t compete on price because the Chinese camera manufacturer have the following competitive advantages:

• No overhead features. Most Chinese vision cameras have standard features like exposure, gain, white balance control, etc., but no advanced features like pixel binning and skipping. By reducing the amount of advanced features, less development time and less expensive FPGA's (Hardware) is needed. This results in lower cost price per camera
• Scale of Economy. China is the largest manufacturing market of electronics and cameras. First of all, electronic components like image sensors, FPGA, pcb, resistors, capacitors, coils, connectors, etc., are cheaper on the Chinese market then on the European market due to the volume request and country of origin in the corresponding countries. High production volumes combined with lower prices for raw materials, result in a lower cost price per product
• Labor costs. Labor cost in China are lower than in Europe, reducing the cost price of a product

Some distributors like #VA Imaging have combined this with a unique business model to reduce further costs like:

• low margin's per camera, independent of quantity up to 200 pieces single order. We believe that every new project or product starts with the order of a single camera. Providing the customer a low price for a single camera is our contribution in the believe that you can make great products and more volume will come in the future.
• Low overhead costs. Flexible scale resources to the needed demand and many processes are automated.

And they also offer transparency. For the first time you can see the pricing of the camera, without making any login account at www.va-imaging.com

The biggest hurdle Chinese camera manufacturers have to overcome is gaining trust. While we automatically trust European camera manufacturers, we tend to be hesitative when it concerns Chinese camera manufacturers. For the Chinese brands to build trust in the vision camera market in Europe it needs time. The first integrators and OEM customers are slowly switching to a Chinese vision camera manufacturers and many will follow.