"That's not the case for Mike Wolf. How does he manage too keep the same factory?"
I'm pretty sure that isn't entirely correct. There was Samhongsa in Korea, who did all their diecast locos, and disappeared some years back. More recently I seem to recall that at least one of the factories MTH was using closed down and there was some delay in finding another facility to use the tooling.
Our importers apparently have very little direct control of the factories in China, at least for these cottage industries, which are small potatoes compared with the likes of Apple, as an extreme example.
