Used PLCs from Asia

I am looking around for an Omron CP1H PLC and on ebay I find loads of them, used, shipping out of Korea, China, Hong Kong, claimed to be fully operational. I wonder why they have so many used, "fully operational" PLCs. These hit the market less than 10 years ago; are there really enough <10y/o machines being decommissioned to provide a steady flow used "perfectly good" PLCs to eBay? I have checked the feedback of some of the sellers and they are selling appropriate (related) merchandise, and have sufficient amount of positive feedback that I would not otherwise suspect a scam. I just don't get it.

It could be the same as the other products that they manufacture over there, in some of those places (I have actually been to Korea and seen this first hand) you can walk along the street and buy name brand stuff that is manufactured there, some is knock off, some is genuine merch that they either steal or is overflow product that they are allowed to take. Granted I seen this in shoes, jackets, cosumer electronics, etc., but it is not a stretch of the imagination that a similar practice is involved, since selling PLC's on a street corner is not practical they sell them on Ebay.

Also possible they steal them from work after a machine is discontinued. To my understanding Asia, especially China is in an industrial boom trying to catch up with the world in manufacturing practices. When you are trying to make the drastic changes they are to catch up it is not hard to think that they are throwing machines away every couple years (china is not known for proper maintenance practices) due to bad machine where the controller is still perfectly good.

These are my guesses where I might not 100% accurate on them I would believe I am atleast on the target somewhere. Unless they are just "look alike" parts then I missed by a lot.

When clicking on your 'link' they are not all used, if you select used on the left side it drops down from 52 to 14, so 14 used ones for a 10 year old CPU is not very many when you are talking the whole world

That said, looking at the price difference I would get a new one and not have to worry about someone changing out a CPU because they had cycled the outputs a 1 gazillion times

A word of caution

I don't know if it applies, but we recently purchased a new machine from China that had a fairly well known HMI on it. When we attempted to make some changes to the HMI, it was discovered that the OS was modififed so that it required a PC operating only in Chinese to create/modify/download the program. I ended up purchasing an identical HMI from here in the states so we could make the necessary changes.

They fit the definition of grey market items. It's the similar to text book that sell for 1/3 of the price oversea. Manufacture know they can't charge the same amount in developing nations but you will get no US warranty support. They might be good deal depending on your application.

They copy and clone everything.

So much so that some plc vendors have a routine to sniff out whether you are programming a genuine model.
I seem to remember a machine from China with a cloned Mitsubishi plc
that gave me a message that it was a clone.

Ronnie Sullivan said:

They copy and clone everything.

Click to expand...

They also make everything... just about everything from Siemens now is made there

I remember a machine that came from Japan with a Mitsubishi PLC with integrated motion

I contacted mitsi uk for support and they told me it did not exist.

After a site visit to look they found out it was only available in japan...

grey markets are not the place to buy parts for a business IMHO

Here is a grey market one for ya...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/171158474347

Its a 1747-UIC made in China, its hard to tell its not made by Allen Bradley but its a look alike because there is no AB name/label

The one below is a real UIC, you can see there is a A-B logo but not in the China model, people think they are getting a great deal but one of these days they will plug it in and the 24vdc will smoke there laptop, now they just spent 1k for a cable and everything else that they were working on