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If you’re buying Indian porcelain through an Italian, Spanish or German distributor right now, you’ve probably already done the maths once in your head. Everyone who buys this way eventually asks the same question. Is the guy I buy from actually adding enough value to justify what he’s charging me on top? If you’re weighing tegels direct importeren uit India (importing tiles direct from India) against just staying put with your distributor, this post is built for exactly that decision.
We walked through the full landed cost of bringing a container into Rotterdam in our last post , so we won’t repeat that breakdown here.
What matters for this post is simpler: your distributor already paid every one of those costs before you ever saw their price list. Then they added their own margin, their warehousing, and a second inland delivery leg on top.
One thing this post isn’t about, worth saying up front. We’ve already covered where your tile comes from in India vs China vs Turkey and India vs Italy vs Spain. This one assumes you’ve already settled in India. The question here is how you buy it once you’ve made that call.
That’s not a criticism of distributors. For a lot of buyers, that stack of extra costs is worth paying. But if you’re buying enough tile, on a regular enough schedule, it’s worth knowing exactly what that markup buys you and at what point it stops being worth it.
Strip it down to what’s really happening. Your distributor imported a container from India, which means they paid FOB price, sea freight, marine insurance, EU customs duty, the anti-dumping duty on Indian tile, and imported VAT at their own border. Once that container cleared, they moved it into their own warehouse, held it as stock, and shipped it to you as a smaller, more convenient order. Every one of those steps costs money, and every one of those costs is baked into the price you’re paying per square metre.
None of that is hidden or sneaky. It’s just the price of buying in smaller quantities from someone who’s already done the heavy lifting. The question isn’t whether that price is fair. It’s whether, at your volume, you’d rather pay for that convenience or do the heavy lifting yourself.
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Buying via EU distributor
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Importing direct from India
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None of these six things is automatically better. They’re trade-offs, and which side wins depends entirely on how you buy and how much capital you’re willing to sit on.
This is really the whole question wrapped into one line. At what point does taking on the container, the compliance file, and the working capital actually pay off?
The honest answer comes down to cadence more than the size of any single order. A distributor placing one or two ad hoc orders a year almost never benefits from going direct. The savings on unit cost get eaten up by capital sitting idle between orders, and the compliance overhead isn’t worth building for something you do occasionally. The same logic holds whether you’re stocking standard ranges or sourcing commercial specification tiles for a named project. It’s the ordering rhythm that decides it, not the category of tile.
Where it flips is when you’re ordering containers regularly enough that the capital keeps turning. If you’re already buying the equivalent of a container or more every few months through your current distributor, that’s usually the signal. Someone placing four or five containers a year through a distributor is, in effect, already running a container-based buying pattern. The only thing missing is their own name on the shipping documents and the margin someone else is currently keeping. At that cadence, the markup adds up to real money over a year.
Article 23 changes this calculation too. Once you’re deferring your import VAT to your periodic return instead of paying it at the border, the working capital hit of going direct gets a lot smaller. That 21% isn’t sitting frozen in a container anymore, it’s a line on your tax return. Commercial tile procurement direct from a manufacturer stops looking like a cash flow risk once that mechanism is in place, and starts looking more like a straightforward cost decision.
Want to see where your own numbers land before committing to anything? Request three free samples and we’ll walk the container maths alongside them.
We’re not going to pretend direct import is the answer for everyone, because it isn’t.
If you’re placing small, mixed orders, a few pallets here, a top-up there, going direct makes no sense. Container MOQs don’t bend for that kind of buying, and you’d end up holding stock you don’t need just to hit the minimum. If you don’t have capital sitting free to lock into a container for the weeks it takes to ship, clear and deliver, that’s a real constraint, not a failure of ambition. A distributor who’s already holding stock locally means you can top up a job that’s short a few boxes without waiting a shipping cycle for it, and that flexibility is worth something on its own. And if you have zero appetite for holding a compliance file, dealing with customs classification, or being the one who answers for a Declaration of Performance if a project inspector asks, buying through a distributor who already carries that burden is a completely reasonable choice.
There’s no prize for going direct if it means tying up money you need somewhere else, or taking on paperwork you don’t have time to manage properly. Plenty of successful Dutch distributors buy exclusively through EU channels and do just fine.
Where direct import earns its keep beyond the unit cost is control. When you’re buying from a distributor, you’re often buying the same SKUs as everyone else on their list. Your competitor down the road could be selling the identical tile at a similar price, because you’re both sourcing from the same warehouse.
Going direct changes that. You can lock in exclusivity in your territory, commission your own sizes and finishes, and go further with private label, same production, same quality controls, but packaged and branded as yours. Nobody else is selling that exact SKU under that exact name.
If you’re building a brand you want to own long term rather than just moving product, this is the part of the direct route a distributor relationship genuinely can’t offer you.
If you do decide directly it is worth it, the supplier side of the equation matters just as much as the maths. Here’s what you should be asking for from anyone you’re considering, us included:
If a supplier hesitates on any of those, that tells you something. It’s worth asking the same questions of us that you’d ask of anyone else.
We manufacture in Morbi, quote FOB, and handle export documentation start to finish, including the clearance-ready paperwork your broker needs at Rotterdam.
Whether you’re weighing your first direct container or looking at bringing your existing distributor relationship in-house, get in touch and we’ll walk through what your actual numbers look like at your volume, no obligation either way.
On a per-m² basis, direct import removes the European distributor's margin, warehousing and second inland leg, but adds the importer's own duty, anti-dumping, VAT, clearance and working-capital commitments. The comparison holds at container volumes and generally does not below them.
Direct import is normally quoted per container, with MOQ set per SKU so a mixed load can meet the minimum across several lines. A 20ft container holds roughly 800 m² of 600×1200mm porcelain.
Selecting and verifying the manufacturer, agreeing specifications and per-SKU MOQ for both standard ranges and commercial specification tiles, arranging freight and insurance, clearing customs and duty, holding the compliance file including the Declaration of Performance and test reports, and managing reorder timing against stock cover.
By ordering container quantities direct from a Morbi manufacturer, confirming batch and shade consistency and MOQ per SKU, shipping to Rotterdam, and clearing customs using an EORI number with import VAT either paid at the border or deferred under an Article 23 licence.
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