Firstly, it's good to be aware that the vast majority of student and intermediate instruments are built in China, even the one from major manufacturers. It's often only once you get to the 'Pro-level' instruments that things are actually being manufactured in places like Japan, the USA, Europe etc. Some of them make their intermediate instruments, but the parts were usually manufactured in China and they just assemble the instrument to make sure it's put together decently.
There are also some boutique and high-end brands that are selling instruments built in part or in whole in China. I've seen horns that are being sold for $3500USD that I know are being made in China for about 1/4 of that price. Also, many boutique makers are really boutique "assemblers" that are assembling instruments from parts made in China, especially the Bells and valve blocks. This is not a criticism, many/most of these instruments likely play very, very well!
The point is simply that:
1) A lot of musical instruments and musical instrument parts are already manufactured in China, even by the big names and the boutique brands.
2) A some brands are reselling these instruments for 200-500% markups.
We want to make music accessible so we simply find the good quality instruments, and mark them up just enough to cover our time and operational costs.
In seeking out the instruments we'd be happy to sell, we found a lot of not-so-good ones.
Many instruments sounded quite good but did not blow evenly or had very poor intonation across the different octaves. A common issue on many of the Bb trumpets we tested was that the instrument was overall very (needed the tuning slide pulled a long way) and the G ontop of the staff wanted to sit more than a 1/4 tone sharp (i.e. closer to a G#).
We also found many had odd slotting issues, especially noticable above the staff. Some of them will play pretty well but simply wont slot a specific note! Much of this was the result of a cheap, poorly-made valve block, and a few other design issues that would require disasembling the instruments and using expensive equipment to fix. In other words, once you factored in the time required to improve the instrument's playability to a proper standard, you would no longer be able to sell it for an affordable price.
It's also important to know that many, many of the 'manufacturers' of trumpets in China are themselves simply buying instruments from the cheapest factories and adding custom valve caps and so forth. So many of the instruments are actually the same instrument with some cosmetic changes. This is not obvious until you compare them side by side and see for yourself, and find them have the same fundamental issues with how they play.
This is the trouble with simply purchasing instruments off places like Amazon, Temu, AliExpress, Ebay etc. You might luck onto an instrument that plays really well, but you might also need to buy 10 different trumpets from 10 different manufactures before you come across a good one. By the time you've done that, you might as well have bought a name-brand instrument.
We've done that work for you, and have found the instruments and manufacturers that are already excellently made and play extremely well, and have made them available to the Australian market for a really great price. Our margin on these instruments is really low, and we can only manage to offer those prices because there are no distributors/resellers in the middle, and we're (currently) a 1-person business and have low operating costs and overheads,
We're selling these instruments more as a service to folks who want an affordable, good-quality instrument, rather than to make any substantial profit from them.
Music not money; people not profits!
