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Rebase costs on USD/THB; add timelines and first market data

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Currency
- Base currency moves from EUR to USD and THB throughout. Rates at
  5 Aug 2026: 1 USD = 33 THB, 1 EUR = 1.155 USD, 1 GBP = 1.35 USD.
  EUR/THB lands at ~38, so existing THB research needed no change.
- Vendor quotes keep their original currency with a USD/THB equivalent
  alongside, so they stay checkable against the source PDFs.
- Full vision ~4.7-8.9M USD; phased entry ~1.7-2.9M USD.

New documents
- production-timeline.md: order turnaround stage by stage. Launch
  8-14 weeks, mature 5-10, repress 2-3. Quantifies the in-house
  galvanics turnaround claim the repo had asserted without a number,
  and flags artwork as an unmodelled fourth approval gate.
- project-timeline.md: calendar to first paying release, ~Q4 2028.
  Critical path is BOI certificate to press order to build to
  commissioning. Two findings: Newbilt build time is absent from the
  repo yet carries ~40% of the schedule, and the BOI rule may be
  over-serialised since duty exemption attaches at importation rather
  than at contract signature.

First market data (ResurRec, Bangkok)
- Invoice-derived prices, a factory tour, and a confirmed fleet of one
  Newbilt Classic 12" automatic plus one semi-automatic.
- Price ladder recorded at 300/500/1000-3000/3000+ units. Decomposes
  to roughly 34-50k THB fixed per title and 535-780 THB variable per
  unit, which is 4-7x the price this model assumes.
- The incumbent presses 230-350k records/yr but buys every stamper as
  an import. That single constraint plausibly explains their 150-unit
  floor, their flat discount ladder and their large-run lead time, and
  it is what an in-house galvanics line attacks. Logged as an open
  question on whether galvanics should move from phase 5 to phase 1.
- Inferences are marked as inferences; the whole set is one buyer and
  one plant, and the model is deliberately left unrebased until a
  second data point exists.

Corrections
- Gross margin arithmetic did not follow from its own inputs. Restated
  as ~1.95 USD at the midpoint with the 0.75-3.15 spread shown; the
  previous "40 to 55%" was not supported.
- Direct cost low total 1.50 to 1.45 USD; contingency THB high 40M
  to 38M.
- README indexes the construction RFQ, which was missing.
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# Production Timeline: Order to Delivered Record
How long an order actually takes, stage by stage. This is the time
dimension of [process-flow.md](process-flow.md), which lists all nine
stages and every check but no durations.
The repo asserts turnaround as the core regional advantage in four
places — "competes on turnaround and freight against EU/US plants",
"in-house galvanics removes days of turnaround", "validate turnaround
against the regional pitch", "get a written turnaround SLA" — without
ever putting a number on it. This page puts numbers on it so the claim
can be tested at Making Vinyl instead of repeated.
**Every figure is an estimate** from industry norms and this repo's own
equipment data. Nothing is vendor-confirmed and no order has ever run
through this plant. Durations are **working days** unless stated;
divide by 5 for weeks, and note that Thai public holidays run to
16–20 days a year, clustered heavily around Songkran in April.
## The headline
| Configuration | Plant-controlled | Including customer gates |
|---|---|---|
| **Launch** (bridge stampers, no in-house cutting or galvanics) | ~21–39 days | **~8 to 14 weeks** |
| **Mature** (full chain in-house) | ~14–20 days | **~5 to 10 weeks** |
| **Repress** from an archived mother, no changes | ~7–11 days | **~2 to 3 weeks** |
Reported EU/US plant lead times currently run roughly **10 to 16 weeks**
for a standard black LP, down from the 6-to-9-month peak of 2021–22. An
Asian label using a European plant adds freight on top of that in both
directions. So the mature configuration is a genuine regional advantage
and the launch configuration is merely competitive — which matters,
because the launch configuration is what the first two years actually
sell.
**Bringing cutting and galvanics in-house takes roughly 3 to 5 weeks out
of the quoted lead time.** That is the number behind the sales story,
and it is the commercial case for the Phase 5 galvanics line stated in
time rather than in the ~665 USD per title of stamper cost that
[revenue-model.md](finance/revenue-model.md) already counts.
## Two tracks run in parallel
A full-service order is not one chain. The metal path and the packaging
path run concurrently and converge at assembly, and **the packaging path
is the one that most often slips**, because it waits on artwork the
customer owes and on a print partner who is not us.
```mermaid
flowchart LR
subgraph M[Metal and record path]
A[Audio intake] --> B[Mastering] --> C[Cutting]
C --> D[Galvanics] --> E[Stamper prep] --> F[Test pressing]
F --> G[Production run] --> H[Finishing]
end
subgraph P[Packaging path]
X[Artwork received] --> Y[Proof and Delta E approval]
Y --> Z[Carton and sleeve print run]
end
H --> I[Assembly and packaging]
Z --> I
I --> J[Fulfilment]
```
Printed jackets from a local carton partner typically need **10 to 20
working days** from approved artwork. That fits comfortably underneath
the metal path — but only if artwork lands early. When a label delivers
artwork after approving the test pressing, the jackets become the
critical path and every day of metalwork saved is wasted.
**Consequence for the order intake process:** artwork deadline is
effectively a fourth approval gate and should be contracted as one,
alongside the three artist gates in
[process-flow.md](process-flow.md). It is not currently modelled as a
gate anywhere in the repo.
## Stage by stage
Times below are elapsed scheduled duration for one title, not touch
labour. The "launch" column reflects the phased entry in
[total-investment.md](finance/total-investment.md): bridge stampers from
Stamper Discs, lacquer cutting brokered through their EU partners, and
no mastering room of our own.
| # | Stage | Launch | Mature | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Audio intake and technical QA | 1–2 | 1–2 | Checksums, format, levels, side-length vs format. Rejects here are cheap; rejects later are not |
| — | **Gate: master plan approved** | *customer* | *customer* | 2–10 days in practice |
| 2 | Vinyl mastering | 3–7 | 2–4 | Launch: external engineer or partner. Mature: in-house room, and queue depth becomes ours to manage |
| — | **Gate: master approved** | *customer* | *customer* | 2–10 days; more if the artist wants revisions |
| 3 | Lathe cutting to lacquer | — | 1–2 | Includes test cut, groove microscope, dead-wax scribe |
| 4 | Silvering and electroforming | — | 2–4 | Three generations plus XRF, metrology, mother listening check |
| 5 | Stamper prep | — | 1 | Punch, back-finish, coin, concentricity |
| 3–5 | **Outsourced cut + metal** (launch only) | 10–20 | — | Stamper Discs, Sheffield; queue is theirs, not ours |
| — | **Stamper freight UK → TH + customs** | 3–7 | — | Air freight; nickel travels well, unlike lacquer |
| 6 | Press setup and test pressing | 1 | 0.5–1 | Mold change, stamper mount, warm-up, 10–20 TPs |
| — | **TP to artist + gate: TP approved** | *5–15* | *5–15* | Courier plus listening time. The single largest customer-side block |
| 7 | Production run | 1–5 | 1–3 | Throughput table below |
| 8 | Finishing, assembly, packaging | 2–4 | 2–3 | Trim is inline; shrink and jacket assembly are labour-bound |
| 9 | Fulfilment and dispatch | 1–3 | 1–2 | Bulk pallet, or per-parcel dropship on an ongoing basis |
Two things the table deliberately does not hide:
- **Stages 3, 4 and 5 collapse into one 10–20 day external block at
launch**, and its duration is not ours to control. That is precisely
why [roadmap.md](roadmap.md) item 14 calls for a **written turnaround
SLA** with Stamper Discs. Without one, the whole quoted lead time
rests on a supplier's goodwill, and they have no documented Asian
customers to set expectations from.
- **Lacquers do not fly.** A cut lacquer is soft nitrocellulose, heat-
and shock-sensitive, and wants plating within roughly 24 to 72 hours.
The launch configuration is sound precisely because it never ships
one: audio goes to Europe as a file, the lacquer is cut and plated in
the same region, and only finished nickel stampers make the journey.
Any future arrangement that cuts in Thailand and plates abroad — or
the reverse — would be a quality risk, not just a slower schedule.
## Production run throughput
From the fleet assumptions in [scale.md](scale.md), after the 60–70%
overall effectiveness already applied there.
| Fleet | Good records/day | 300 units | 500 | 1,000 | 2,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch: 1 semi-auto, 1 shift | ~300–450 | <1 day | 1–2 | 2–3 | 5–7 |
| Duplex: 2 semi-auto, 2 shifts | ~1,000–1,500 | <1 | <1 | 1 | 1–2 |
| Mature: 2 semi + 2 auto, 2 shifts | ~3,300–5,000 | <1 | <1 | <1 | <1 |
Read these as **press-days, not calendar days**. At mature scale no
single title gets the whole plant; it gets a scheduled slot. Past
roughly 60% utilisation the queue in front of the press starts to
dominate everything in the table above it, and quoted lead time
decouples from process time entirely.
That is the standard failure mode for pressing plants and it is worth
stating plainly: **lead time is a capacity decision, not a process
decision.** A plant running at 90% quotes 16 weeks with the same
equipment that quotes 6 weeks at 50%. Any turnaround promise made to
the market is implicitly a promise to hold spare capacity.
Small runs invert the arithmetic. At 300 units the run itself is under
an hour of pressing and the entire timeline is setup, approvals and
assembly — which is exactly the boutique/color work the semi-automatic
line exists to serve, per
[pressing-line.md](equipment/pressing-line.md). Small runs are not
faster to deliver; they are only cheaper to press.
## Repress: the shortest path in the plant
A repress of an existing title with no artwork or audio changes skips
stages 1 through 3 and all three artist gates. If a **mother** was
archived, a fresh stamper is pulled and the order runs:
| Step | Days |
|---|---|
| Pull stamper from archived mother | 1–2 |
| Stamper prep | 1 |
| Press setup, first-article check | 0.5 |
| Production run (1,000) | 1–3 |
| Finishing, assembly, dispatch | 3–5 |
| **Total** | **~7–11 working days** |
Two commercial consequences worth acting on:
- **Choose the 3-step process and archive mothers.** Stamper Discs
offers both 1-step and 3-step. A 1-step stamper is faster and cheaper
for a one-off, but it is a single-use part: there is no mother to go
back to, so a repress restarts at lacquer cutting and costs the
customer six weeks and a new cutting fee. 3-step buys the two-week
repress, and that repress is the highest-margin order the plant will
ever take.
- **The mother archive is an asset with a shelf life.** It needs the
storage conditions and the genealogy records that
[traceability.md](traceability.md) already specifies, and a stated
retention policy — how long a customer's mothers are kept before
they are scrapped or returned. That policy does not exist yet and
should be in the customer contract, not discovered later.
## What to promise a customer
A defensible quoted lead time is **not** the sum of the mature column.
It carries queue and it carries a buffer, and it should be quoted from
the last customer gate, not from order date — the plant cannot be held
to a clock the customer keeps stopping.
| Order type | Quote | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| New title, full service, launch config | **10–14 weeks** | Stage sum plus external metal queue plus buffer |
| New title, full service, mature config | **7–9 weeks** | |
| New title, customer supplies jackets | **−1 to 2 weeks** | Removes the print path |
| Repress from archived mother | **2–3 weeks** | |
| Rush slot | **premium, capped per month** | Only credible with reserved capacity |
Quote in weeks from **test-pressing approval**, with the pre-approval
stages quoted separately as "typically X weeks, subject to your
approvals". Every plant that quotes from order date and gets caught by
a slow artist ends up explaining itself.
## Honest caveats
- **No order has ever run through this plant.** These are planning
numbers built from vendor throughput data and industry norms, and
early production will run slower than any of them while the reject
rate settles — [revenue-model.md](finance/revenue-model.md) already
concedes the same about its 5–10% reject allowance.
- **The external metal block at launch is unmeasured.** 10–20 days is
an industry-typical figure, not a Stamper Discs commitment. Get it in
writing before it appears in a customer quote.
- **Equipment lead times are absent from the repo entirely** and do not
affect this page, but do affect
[project-timeline.md](project-timeline.md), which is where they
matter.
- **The competitive comparison is the least validated part.** Whether
regional labels will actually pay for 7 weeks instead of 14 plus
freight is the same open question as the 3.50–4.60 USD blended price,
and both should be tested in the same conversations at Making Vinyl.
A turnaround advantage nobody pays a premium for is a cost, not a
moat.