Yes, the cylinder and upright YDK motors are the same motor, just one has a shorter spindle.
It's not that what is out there now is inherently bad per se, rather it's a bit of a lottery. They might last a fortnight or three years. We see a higher failure rate than we used to and that is down to suppliers (and this is all of them, not just Quаltex) all wanting to be the cheapest on the platforms such as Amazon and eBay. And when they want to source cheaper, that means the Chinese factories cut corners and use cheaper components. Even the boxes are cheaper and thinner than they used to be.
The majority are still not too bad, but stories like AA958's do pop up. We are mostly using Europart Maddocks motors now (actually, we source very little from Quаltex nowadays), but they have the TCO on the inside, and people used to be sniffy about that, but again, that is a cost-cutting measure as it's a bit cheaper to do.
This relentless drive for cheaper prices has created a vicious cycle where profit margins for big suppliers are increasingly squeezed. With each attempt to outdo competitors on price, there's a compounding pressure to further reduce costs, often at the expense of product reliability and longevity. As a result, the industry finds itself caught in a race to the bottom, where the true cost of cutting corners only becomes apparent when customers experience failures and dissatisfaction with the products they've purchased.
Let's do a back of the fag packet calculation. Taking into account the current price of £17.48 of a Quаltex motor on Amazon, subtracting
Amazon's 20% cut, VAT, and delivery costs to you, and assuming a modest £2-4 profit per unit, each motor must be manufactured, shipped, and have duties and VAT paid, all totalling to around £6-8 per unit. Which leaves perhaps £4 for the cost in China. £4 doesn't buy you a lot of motor in China.