MOQ in China: Three Minimums Hiding in One Quote

By CHX Metal Engineering Team · Published 2026-11-10

Ask for MOQ and a Chinese machine shop will usually say one piece, and here that is true: a single part is a real order and prototypes go out in 3-7 days. The number that actually sets your price is elsewhere - the bar the mill will cut, the finisher's batch charge, and setup spread across 220 machines.

The question that opens most threads

A first email from a buyer usually carries three lines about a turned part, one material callout, an attached drawing, and a closing question: what is your MOQ? It is a fair thing to ask. It is also easy to answer truthfully and still leave the buyer with the wrong expectation, because the shop's minimum and the order's real floor are two different numbers, and only one of them belongs to the shop.

We do take one piece. That answer sits near the end of this page because it is the least useful of the three minimums a small order runs into.

Order minimum: one piece, and it is not a slogan

On a turning job, one piece means a bar gets loaded, a program is proven, a first article is measured, and the part ships in 3–7 days if the drawing is clean. What a buyer pays for that single part is setup and proving, not metal. A one-off pin can cost more than twenty of the same pin, and nobody is padding anything — the fixed work is genuinely fixed. If you want the mechanics of that, they are laid out in what sits inside a Chinese CNC quote.

The trap is reading “MOQ 1” as “MOQ 1 at the batch price”. It is not, and no honest shop will pretend otherwise. Twenty pieces is often where the per-piece figure stops falling steeply. Somewhere past a few hundred it flattens into material and cycle time. Everything in between is arithmetic you can ask to see.

The bar the mill will actually sell you

Material has a floor of its own and it is set by people who never see your drawing. A distributor will cut a metre off a three or six metre length and charge for the cut, sometimes a minimum invoice on top. Behind that sits the mill lot, which matters on the less common alloys and hardly at all on 303 or 6061 bar that is already on the rack.

The direction of the problem flips with diameter. A Ø6 mm brass pin contains cents of metal, so a cutting charge dominates the material line and a short run stays cheap. A Ø120 mm stainless billet is the reverse: the smallest sensible cut may be several times what eight parts need, and you are buying the remnant whether the drawing asks for it or not. Ten large-diameter parts is a material negotiation before it is a machining one, and the useful question stops being “will you take ten” and becomes “what is the nearest stock size that gets me there”.

Small diameters really are easy. A three metre bar of 303 makes hundreds of pins, and the 70 Tsugami Swiss-type lathes in this plant run bar between Ø1 mm and Ø20 mm as ordinary daily work rather than as a special setup.

Why the anodizing invoice looks wrong

This is the minimum that surprises people, and it is the one a machine shop cannot quote away. Anodizing, passivation, plating and heat treatment are priced by batch. A rack has positions, a tank has a load, a furnace has a lot charge. Send twelve aluminium housings for clear Type II and the finisher bills a minimum — the same minimum it would bill for two hundred. On the invoice the finishing line can exceed the machining line, and from the outside that looks like the machinist got greedy.

Heat treatment is blunter still. The lot charge applies to nine parts or ninety, and a supplier who says hardening is included on a nine-piece order has either absorbed the charge or has not rung the heat treater yet. We learned to say the second thing out loud after a fifteen-piece batch of 6061 came back with a finishing bill larger than the turning, which the buyer had every right to query. Since then the finish minimum goes on the quote as its own line, even when it is small.

The three minimums, and who owns each

Only the first row is negotiable with the shop, and even then only in the sense that the shop can explain what the setup contains. The other two are third-party floors. A supplier who quotes you a hundred pins at the same unit price as ten thousand is either guessing or planning to renegotiate later.

Getting a small order accepted without wasting a week

Send the drawing with the quantity you want and the quantity you could live with. Those are rarely the same number, and the gap is where a supplier can help: combine two part numbers in one material and one finish, and the batch charges get shared instead of doubled. Ask what the nearest stock size is if the diameter is large. Say up front whether the finish is cosmetic, because a visible face changes how the part is machined long before it reaches a tank.

The work here runs on 220 machines in Shajing, Bao'an, Shenzhen — 100 machining centres with 30 of them 3+2, 50 CNC lathes, 70 Tsugami Swiss-type — turning up to 5 million pieces a month, which is why a one-piece order does not disturb anything and a five-thousand-piece order does not need a new line. Critical features hold ±0.005 mm, unmarked tolerances fall to ISO 2768-m. Prototyping takes 3–7 days, production 7–15, and finishing adds its own few days on top. Terms are EXW Shenzhen only - we are happy to recommend reliable freight forwarders.

If the part is still being shaped, the cheaper conversation is a DFM pass before the quantity conversation — a wall thickness or a thread callout moved now costs nothing, and moved after the first batch costs a setup. There is a turned-part DFM checklist on this site for that stage, and a separate note on running genuinely small batches for when the number stays low on purpose.

So the honest reply to the email is not a number. It is: one piece, yes, and here is what the other two minimums will do to your price before you commit to twenty.