What Is a Screw Air Compressor?

Salespeople at domestic compressor factories have a habit. Customer asks about private labeling, no matter what, first answer is "OEM is possible." When you actually sit down to talk, turns out what they call OEM is letting you pick a ready-made machine from the catalog and change the brand. In the industry that should be called ODM. Two terms mixed up so long even factory people don't know the difference anymore.

ODM is buying the factory's existing design and putting your brand on it. Factory catalog is there, pick one, negotiate price, change nameplate color, order, produce, ship. IP belongs to the factory; you get product plus license to use their brand. OEM is the reverse: you bring drawings and specs to the factory, have them make to your requirements. Design is yours, factory just earns processing fees.

Manufacturing

Compressor Factory Production

Sounds clearly different, but in practice lots of gray area.

Paper Comparison

Table says this, reality isn't so neat. Say you pick the factory's 37kW screw compressor, that's ODM. Then you want the control system swapped to Inovance inverter with your PLC, add 4G remote monitoring, change motor to WEG. Stack those up and pricing, timeline, MOQ all change. Call it ODM fine, call it ODM with customization fine, call it light OEM some factories do that. How to write the contract, how to split costs, has to be matched item by item.

How Deep OEM Waters Run

Doing OEM with a factory, prerequisite is you can deliver complete technical requirements. Tech spec doc, appearance drawings, test standards, nameplate design, packaging scheme, all ready. Some customers have strong design capability, give you complete BOM, assembly process, QC flow, factory just follows. Factories like these customers, less back-and-forth. Some customers only have a vague idea: "I want a machine with about this discharge volume, about this power, looks nice." Rest needs factory help to flesh out. Can help, engineering fees extra.

Quote items: tooling fees, NRE development fees, sampling fees, certification fees, product unit price.

Tooling fees on paper might be $4,000-7,000, screw compressor sheet metal housing isn't super complex. Complex designs or big power models can hit $15,000-20,000. Quote is just starting point; actual tooling has adjustments and tweaks. Overruns common, 20-30% over at settlement shouldn't surprise you. Some factories quote tooling low and tack on adjustment costs later bit by bit.

NRE fees, some call development fees, cover engineer labor for process conversion, writing process docs, debugging production line. Some factories list it clearly, some don't separate it and spread into unit price. Low NRE doesn't mean low total; calculate the whole thing.

Whole OEM project from contract to first batch shipping, short is four months. New tooling plus tight factory scheduling can drag to eight or nine months. Certification needed adds more. CE for one screw compressor set around $3,000-4,000, two to three months. North American UL way more expensive and slower.

Why ODM Looks Simple

ODM process is short. Flip through catalog, pick model, negotiate price, sign contract, factory schedules, three to four weeks up to six or seven weeks to ship, depends on stock and capacity.

What you can change: nameplate brand, machine color, packaging printing, control panel language, voltage/frequency config. Basically stops there.

What you can't change: core structure, performance specs, dimensions. You want 4.2 cubic meter discharge, factory catalog has 3.8 and 5.0 closest, pick one, no middle option. Want different motor brand, beyond ODM scope, needs separate discussion and quote.

Logistics

Shipping & Distribution

Production

Assembly Line

ODM problem is no product moat. Machine you're getting from this factory today, your competitor might be getting too. Different nameplate, different color, identical inside. Run into same product in market, price war has zero leverage.

Some customers try to negotiate regional exclusivity on ODM, like this model in Southeast Asia only sold to me. Good if you get it, more often you don't. Fallback is at least differentiate on color and appearance so your product and competitor's don't look identical.

Special Characteristics of Compressor Industry

Screw airends are 30-40% of complete machine cost, highest tech barrier component. Domestically only about a dozen factories make their own airends; everyone else buys from outside, either imports or domestic specialty airend makers.

Creates a problem: go to a factory that sources airends to talk OEM, their customization has a ceiling. Can't change rotor profiles, they don't make the airend. Specs the airend supplier doesn't have, they can't make. You want to specify GHH airends, they have no purchasing channel with GHH, dead end.

Factories with their own airends have much more room, from profiles to castings everything can be touched. Trade-off is higher MOQ, longer cycle, higher price.

For screw compressors, customizable parts besides airends are mainly:

Sheet metal housing customization: color change is simple, just respray. Design change needs tooling; sheet metal tools cheap at $3,000-4,000, complex designs over $10,000. Some factories quote tooling high and unit price low, others opposite, calculate total yourself.

Electrical config follows target market, regular export factories can all do it. Explosion-proof is different, needs specific certs.

Post-treatment config, dryers, filters, receivers, tech barrier not high, match to customer's application.

Certification follows target market. Exporting to Europe, CE is baseline; North American market UL is expensive and slow; Russian-speaking markets EAC; Australia RCM. Certification costs typically on customer. Factories with export experience have main models certified already; ODM customers can use factory's certs, something to compare when picking factories. Small factories with little export experience, ask them to apply for a cert and they don't even know the process, timeline drags forever.

Controls

Digital Interface

Monitoring

System Integration

Certification

Quality Standards

Pitfalls in Partnerships

IP protection: NDA signed doesn't mean you're safe. Agreement execution depends on conscience; actually litigating takes forever and costs a ton, usually doesn't go there. For stronger grip, build safeguards into product design: specify key component suppliers, don't hand over control system source code, push critical parameters through cloud delivery not hardcoded locally. Even if factory wants to copy, they can't assemble all the pieces.

Quality acceptance: writing "complies with GB/T XXXXX standard" in contract is meaningless, list specific inspection items and criteria. Send someone to watch first batch on-site, or have third party do factory inspection. When problems occur, quality traceability terms are more useful than claim clauses. Being able to trace which material batch, which line, which shift produced it gives direction for improvement.

ODM to OEM transition watch out for product differentiation. Early stage using ODM to build market, later want OEM to push exclusive product, if old ODM models are still circulating heavily, new model appearance needs clear distance from old, otherwise customers can't tell apart and competitors have ammo.

Payment and delivery breach terms vary by factory, won't expand. One point: compressor shipping peaks in first half of year, March April May factory scheduling tight, delivery delay probability rises. Orders that can go early should go early.

MOQ

ODM relabeling, small machines five to ten units or so, medium power three to five units or so, big machines one or two, most factories accept. Off-season might negotiate lower.

OEM depends. Just nameplate and color changes, MOQ similar to ODM. Sheet metal tooling, factory quotes vary widely, some want twenty units some want fifty plus, depends how tooling cost is split. Control system software dev, factory evaluates labor hours and backs into MOQ that covers cost. Deep customization developing a whole new model for customer, without hundred-plus units annual demand usually not worth discussing.

These numbers are reference starting points for negotiation, actual variation is big, depends on product, factory, market conditions at the time. Same factory, orders plentiful they raise threshold, orders scarce everything becomes negotiable.