berlinonaut

The bikes you are talking about are copies of a Brompton. They are of lower quality, which you indeed can see already when looking at the price (their end-price is lower than what Brompton pays for the parts and materials alone, not counting the labor, not counting the shop, margins). They lack the customizability from factory (which adds on cost with the Brompton as someone has outlined before) and they seem to be a clone w/o own innovation, being probably initially a derivation from the plans and forms that were used when Brompton subcontracted Neobike in the 90ies to serve the Asian market with cheaper Bromptons. Neobike delivered shameful quality for the whole period of the contract (despite being trained by Brompton and having access to the originals plans and tools). After the end of the contract Neobike, instead of returning these, stole them and these, now 25 year old plans and tools are where today's Asian clones result from. Creating a shambolic copy of someone else's innovation is far easier (and clearly cheaper) than to create something that works from own abilities. Plus the copy is almost always worse than the original.