But today no one else makes such P&PM for small businesses
Absolutely true, and about time this changed - despite being about 20 years old, a used Versatronics RV4 is still the best bang/buck for a
small pick & place, and has been for at least a decade.
The Neoden4 could finally change this. The quad-head solution, with vision of all heads at once is a very neat way to improve throughput without needing the expense of super-fast mechanicals.
And the conveyor system to handle long PCBs puts it ahead of many mid to high-end machines - AFAIK there is no other low to mid range (<$50k) machine available that can do this.
Probably the closest is the Mechatronika M10V, but only single head, a bit slow and rather limited feeder options. Don't recall offhand what the pricing is but ISTR somewhere 2-3x the cost of the Neoden4.
Which is why I really hope Neoden get their act together - they have the potential to sell very well outside of China, but to do this they have to supply machines that don't need much support to get going, provide good support where needed, and have a more professional approach to marketing than some Chinglish videos on Youtube.
Although they could partner with an existing European/US SM equipment distributor, the risk in doing this is that their machines will be too much competition for existing expensive lines that distributors make more margin on. And of course distributors will want margin.
For a machine as small as this, selling direct is a perfectly viable approach, but it is even more important that it works out of the box than the more traditional situation of a company engineer coming out to commission a new machine.
Once they have production well under way and dealt with what are hopefully teething troubles, they would do well to hire a couple of EU and US sales people and set up a couple of machines in the back of vans for demonstrations.