Korean quotation scope: what a complete quote covers

A complete quotation out of Korea states four things besides the price: where the scope of supply ends, what is inspected and by whom, which documents are issued and when, and up to which named place the price runs. Everything that makes two offers look different, and everything that makes them look deceptively alike, sits in those four blocks.

Where an offer says nothing about a line, that line is not excluded. It is undefined. It gets defined later, at the point where changing it costs the most — which is why the work that decides a comparison happens when the enquiry goes out, not when the offers come back.

The four blocks a quotation is built from

A Korean shop quoting a machined assembly, a control valve or a packaged system works to the same skeleton. What varies is how much of it the enquiry defined, because an offer answers the question it was asked.

Two offers can be read against each other as soon as all five rows are filled on both sides. Until then the comparison is between a number and a different number's assumptions.

Scope of supply: the boundary is a line somebody has to draw

There is no universal boundary for an item of process equipment. A valve can be quoted as a bare body, as a valve with actuator, or as a valve with actuator, positioner, solenoid, limit switches, air set and tubing, mounted and stroked. All three are honest offers of "the valve". They are not the same purchase.

The mechanical boundary

Ask the offer to name the terminal point. For a flanged item that means whether counter-flanges, gaskets and bolting come with it — in Korea these are commonly quoted as an option line rather than assumed, because on most projects the piping contractor already has them. For a skid it means whether the base frame, anchor bolts, grouting and the interconnecting piping inside the skid limits are included. For a spray-water system around a desuperheater, the boundary sits somewhere between the injection element itself and the whole water train: control valve, strainer, isolation valves, thermowell, spool piece and pipe supports. Where that line falls changes the price by a multiple, and both positions are normal.

The instrument and electrical boundary

Instrument scope is where offers separate most often, and it is rarely visible in the total. The items to see named are the positioner and its protocol, the limit switches, the solenoid valve and its coil voltage, the air filter regulator, junction boxes, the area classification the electrical items are certified to, and whether cabling and tubing between them is in scope or terminates at a junction box. Certification is not a detail: an item certified to one scheme and an item certified to the one your site's authority accepts are different items with different lead times.

What comes with the machine exactly once

First fill of lubricant and hydraulic oil, special tools, lifting devices, commissioning spares and two-year operating spares are five separate lines, and a quotation that includes all five is not more expensive than one that includes none — it is a different quotation. Spares in particular are worth quoting at the same time as the machine even when they are not ordered with it, because the price and the drawing reference are easiest to obtain while the job is live. Once the shop has closed the job, a spare becomes an enquiry of its own, and sometimes a repair or re-manufacture question instead.

Inspection and test: the level is a price, not a formality

Every offer contains inspection, whether or not it says so — nothing ships out of a Korean shop without a hydrostatic record and a dimensional check. What the offer has to state is the level, because the level is what costs money.

The instrument that carries this is the inspection and test plan, issued after order and agreed before manufacturing. Each activity on it is marked with the involvement of each party, in the usual four grades:

• Hold point — work stops until the named party attends and releases it. The heaviest grade; a missed hold point means the shop waits, and waiting shows up in the delivery date.
• Witness point — the named party is invited on a notice period, commonly two to three weeks; work proceeds if nobody comes.
• Review — no attendance, but the record is submitted and signed off.
• Monitor — the activity is logged and available, without a submission requirement.

Underneath the plan sit the tests themselves, and these should be named against a standard rather than described. For valves that means the shell test and the seat leakage class — ANSI/FCI 70-2 Class IV, V or VI are not interchangeable and the difference between them is a trim and a price. For welded and cast items it means the non-destructive examination method and extent, positive material identification on alloys, hardness after any post-weld heat treatment, and for coating, the surface preparation grade and the dry film thickness check. A factory acceptance test on an assembled package means a functional stroke or run against an agreed procedure, and the procedure is a document that should be issued for approval before the test date is fixed.

Two practical items belong in the offer and are often left to be argued about afterwards. Who pays for a third-party inspector, and who pays for a repeat visit if the item is not ready or fails on the day. Neither is a large sum. Both are unpleasant to settle after the fact.

Documents: issued by whom, and against which date

The document block splits three ways, and each part has a different clock.

Drawings for approval

A general arrangement drawing for approval is typically issued one to three weeks after order, and manufacturing does not start until it comes back. The turnaround on the buyer's side belongs to the buyer's schedule — a drawing that sits for four weeks in review has moved the delivery date by four weeks, and a well-written offer says so by quoting lead time from drawing approval rather than from order. Both references are legitimate. They are just not comparable, and this single line is where most delivery comparisons go wrong.

Quality records

Material certificates come in grades, and the grade has to be stated in the order, not requested at the end. Under EN 10204, a 2.2 declaration, a 3.1 certificate issued by the manufacturer's own inspection function and a 3.2 certificate countersigned by an independent inspector are three different documents with three different lead times. Korean mills and foundries issue 3.1 as a matter of course for pressure-retaining materials; 3.2 requires the inspector to be appointed in time to witness, which is a scheduling item rather than a price item. Around it sit the welding records, heat treatment charts, NDE reports, the hydrostatic test report, the coating report and the FAT report, and these are bound together into a final data book whose format, copy count and language should be named up front.

Export and customs documents

The commercial invoice, packing list and transport document are automatic. The ones to raise at quotation stage are the ones with conditions attached. A certificate of origin for Korean goods is issued through the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Separately, Korea has free trade agreements in force with a number of markets, and where your destination is covered, a preferential origin document can reduce the duty you pay on arrival — but eligibility depends on the item's HS classification and the origin rule in that specific agreement, so it is a question to ask before the order, not after the goods sail. Some destinations also require the invoice and certificate to be attested before shipment; that too is cheap to arrange in advance and expensive to fix from the port of discharge.

One item is invisible until it bites. Korea operates an export control regime for strategic items, and certain equipment and materials require a classification check before shipment. Most industrial equipment clears this without difficulty, but where a licence is required it adds weeks to a schedule that was quoted without it. An offer that has already run the classification will normally say so.

Delivery basis: the Incoterm, the named place, and the packing

An Incoterm without a named place is not a term. "CIF" tells you almost nothing; "CIF Jebel Ali" tells you what the freight in the price was built against. The five terms that cover almost all shipments from Korea behave like this:

Two offers on different terms are not a price comparison until one is converted to the other. The conversion needs three numbers the offer should already contain: gross and net weight, packed dimensions per case, and the number of packages. Those numbers decide more than freight cost — once a case passes the internal width of a standard container it moves to a flat rack, an open top or breakbulk, which changes the sailing options, the ports that can handle it and sometimes the route inland at the far end. Sending case dimensions with the enquiry is what makes a logistics line in the quotation mean anything.

Packing itself should be named rather than assumed: seaworthy export packing, wooden cases heat-treated and marked to ISPM 15, VCI film and desiccant with a humidity indicator for machined surfaces on a long sea leg, and case marking that matches the packing list. Sea freight from Busan to the Gulf or South Asia is a matter of weeks in a salt atmosphere, and the difference between adequate and inadequate packing shows up as surface corrosion on arrival, in a cargo where nothing was actually damaged.

One local factor belongs in every lead time discussion. Korean plants and their subcontract shops — castings, machining, heat treatment, coating, NDE — close together for Seollal and Chuseok, both of which move with the lunar calendar, and for a summer maintenance week. A schedule that crosses one of those windows loses working days that no amount of expediting recovers, and a delivery date quoted from an approved drawing has usually already accounted for it.

Putting two quotations on one basis

The normalisation is mechanical once the four blocks are visible. Take the more complete of the two offers, and for every line the other one is silent on, either ask for it or price it in at the level of the offer that has it. Then check the six references below, which are the ones that most often differ without either side being wrong.

Once those six agree, the remaining difference in price is a real difference — in material, in trim, in machining, in the shop's loading that month. That is the difference worth negotiating, and it is normally smaller than the one the raw totals suggested.

The same table works in the other direction. A buyer who sends these six references as part of the enquiry gets offers that are already comparable, and gets them faster, because the estimator is not guessing at what to assume. Enquiries that arrive with a filled datasheet, a named destination and a document list come back quoted; enquiries without them come back as questions. Both are normal, but only one of them is quick. The product pages and the partner pages carry the datasheet fields for the equipment we handle, which is usually the fastest way to see which of them your enquiry has already answered.

The box that comes back blank

Two fields are empty in most enquiries, and they are the two that make a quotation un-comparable no matter how well the rest is written.

The first is the named place after the Incoterm. An enquiry that says "please quote CIF" without a discharge port gets an offer priced to whichever port the estimator picked, and when two suppliers pick differently, the freight difference lands in the total and looks like a price difference. The second is the site and utility data: supply voltage and frequency, instrument air pressure and quality, ambient temperature range, and the area classification. A package priced for one electrical supply and installed on another is not a re-labelling job — motors, heaters and control components are re-selected, and that happens after the order, on the delivery date you already committed to your own project.

Send the scope you need covered, with the destination and the site data, and it comes back showing how each line is quoted — /en/contact.