Complaint Review: CAE Online - Austin Texas

 CAE may have company rules and guidelines, but in my case they were not followed. I was promised payment for the parking and i did agree to wait for their payment until after shipping, which they also agreed upon. They themselves also contacted a freight forwarder and said they were too expensive and asked me to find some other company for a lower cost, which I also did. They also contacted them to see that all was good. Several times they guaranteed payment to me and I was never worried. I put in many hours of work into this project including phone calls, photos, videos, and packing of the equipment and shipping to freight forwarder only for them to later cancel and tell.me they never agreed to pay and would never, ever take my phone calls or return my messages. They would never discuss the matter with me not even once. Luckily for me the machine I was selling was in high demand and I was able to sell it 10 days later and that customer was very happy with the machine and my service. I will always tell my work contacts to not do business with CAE after this bad experience I had with them.

CAE is the largest buyer and seller of secondary semiconductor (and other) manufacturing equipment in the world.  Those who are familiar with this market understand that there is a significant amount of risk built into every purchase.  For this reason, CAE has implemented a rigorous set of procedures designed to protect our customers.

In the instance that this report references, CAE was seeking to purchase equipment from the seller (the author of the report) in order to resell it to one of our customers -- that is, we were acting as the intermediary in the transaction.  Our customer was interested in purchasing the equipment based off the information, photos, and price that were represented to us by the seller.  The seller offered no warranty or guarantee for the items that he was selling, and he requested payment upfront for the purchase.  This is not out of the ordinary for this industry, but of course a purchase structured in this manner entails significant risk given that there would be little to no actual available recourse from the seller if the equipment was found to be misrepresented after it arrived at our customer’s facility.

In order to mitigate the aforementioned risk, CAE submitted a Purchase Order Subject to Inspection for this equipment, meaning that we agreed to purchase the equipment at the stated price if it passed our inspection.  The seller also required this document before allowing us to inspect the equipment.  After completing this inspection, we found that only one item matched the general description and condition stated to us by the seller.  We of course would not proceed with selling the misrepresented equipment to our customer, so we cancelled those items on our conditional purchase order.  Any costs associated with arranging the inspection, which the purchase was contingent upon, were agreed and accepted up front by the seller.

Once an agreement to purchase equipment is finalized, as was the case for one item with this seller, further due diligence is required before funding the seller.  Funding risk is significant in this unregulated industry, so we require several steps to be completed before passing a buyer’s funds through to a seller, each designed to protect our buyer.  We require a supplier due diligence form to be completed, verification of business license (in good standing) from the local secretary of state’s corporate registry, valid business references, verification of bank information, and we screen all parties through a multi-national government database to ensure that they do not appear on any denied parties lists.  If the equipment will be exported, we also complete a set of export compliance measures including, but not limited to, classification of US and/or foreign ECCN’s, confirmation that the equipment is or is not controlled, and subsequent application for export license from the controlling authority (if applicable).  We also offer to arrange the packing, shipping, and other logistics services for our customers.  If any of these options are selected, we require that our vendors adhere to and sign off on our packing and shipping procedures, which are designed and proven to offer the safest method of transport for our cargo. 

The secondary market for capital equipment can be daunting to navigate for nearly all buyers.  CAE has created a platform to allow buyers and sellers to transact in a safe, effective way.  As outlined above, there are instances in which sellers cannot meet the expectations that we require for our buyers, so we elect not to proceed.  This is made clear up front and in the terms of our agreements, so it is disappointing when we must turn to sites like this one to defend our process.