>>1555211I know a thing or two about this topic because I've worked in the industry for a while until I quit this year. More precisely I've been working for a European brand that had every frame produced in china by a chinese company that manufactured our design, we also bought some of their open mold designs exclusively and rebranded them.
There are plenty of chinese brands that sell really well made frames, most notably Winspace which you've probably never heard off but that doesn't matter. Workswell, Velobuild, Hongfu, Dengfu, Carbonda, Lightcarbon just to name a few are reliable brands that have been around for a while, they sell frames to customers and bulk orders to companies alike.
They have decent QC, the same standard as western brand names and plenty of people I know IRL use their frames and wheels, I also have a chinese carbon frame and I've ridden it for almost 60k km at this point with 0 issues and it even tanked a number of crashes so far. Lots of people on forums post good stuff about their frames. These are not some obscure death traps even though some here think so.
If you remember the Kiwi Frame 'manufacturer' Nove, they made a deal with Lightcarbon so they could sell some of their frames exclusively at 5x the price that Lightcarbon sold their frames for and this business practice is common.
A chinese open mold frame for 400 - 600€ isn't 'cheap' either even though you might think so because it's only 1/4 of the price of a high end frame with similar weight/stiffness stats. The company I worked for paid 70-150€ per frame in a ship container load bulk order. We sold these frames for 10-25x that price roughly speaking, depends on the model and the prices varied in complete bikes too. A 150€ frame was a high end model, I'm assuming other western brands pay about the same, top end road bike and TT bike frames with full integration are probably a bit more expensive but I doubt they go for more than 250€ a unit in bulk order.
