Though people emailing randomly looking for quotes on video surveillance equipment is common, rarely do we see requests this large.
Here is what they asked:
Dear Sales,
My name is Eliel, I am from Brazil. I have a big project and we need your help with CCTV quotation. Following the items:
Is it possible you send the quotation today?
Eliel Resina Fernandes | Telemática Sistemas Inteligentes
E-mail: eliel@telematica.com.br
What do you think? Clever way to get low pricing? Crazy?
Nevermind the cameras. Those NSMs tho.
Oh yeah, good eye.
Those NSMs are ~$30,000 and they want 12 of them.
And they randomly email people to get quotes on this. Peculiar.
Could they just be doing it 'pro forma' to fufill some legal or internal obligation without expecting or even desiring a competitive quote?
I don't know but if they get a competitive quote, what are they going to do? Ignore it?
This is a pretty big dollar item request - $500,000+ USD
Yes, ignore it.
True example: I had some water damage to a hardwood floor, insurance company said get three bids for the work.
I got eight.
Sent the insurance company only three, the lowest bid of the bunch being the contractor I wanted to use.
Maybe a security consultant would do the same thing for a client, if he was actually wanting a particular integrator friend to get the bid, but wanted to maintain the illusion of fairness.
The person requesting this appears to work at an integrator.
I do not know how integrators buy Pelco in Brazil, so hard for me to speculate about their tactics here. You should refrain likewise instead of comparing to your hardwood floor purchase.
Used to see this all the time when I was selling Valves and Instrumentation. Out of the blue, a South American company wanted pricing on a whole plant's worth of valves and instruments.
Nevermind the guys who have been working the job with the engineers for over a year, the "customer" wanted competitive pricing from an "alternate supplier". Turned out they were canvassing the whole country because they didn't like the price they already had through channels.
All they are doing is "shopping" and you should likely find that if they did give you the order, there would be almost no way of getting the money back from a buy/resell arrangement when they don't pay you and "lose" all the equipment on the dock in Brazil. They never agree to 100% down type of sales. The check is "always in the mail" and/or the "bank transfer is held up" for some political reason.
There are protected territories in many Manufacturers Representative agreements. They are very important in overseas sales because there are always hidden costs, weird multipliers because of currency and onerous T&C's. The manufacturer has people who handle International sales and they would already know about this much product being quoted. Speaking with them about this issue might garner some favor as well.
Endura requires expensive certification before you can sell it and that may be another reason why this company is canvassing USA reps or distributors.
The export of many items to certain countries is banned by the state department and they try to get around that as well.
They know the lure of "easy money" works well on so many Americans, so they try to capitalize on it in a manner not far removed from Nigerian 419 scammers.
Something is rotten in Brazil or this company would be using authorized channels from their own country.
In this case, I would err on the side of safety. Take the opposite advice of Nike and "Just DON'T do it!"
Ask questions and get answers to your physical security questions from IPVM team members and fellow subscribers.