I presume that the Chinese customs inspectors don't steal the ASICs and start mining with them, so that might be your explanation of why the hashrate isn't rising before the first customers have received their product.
I know that a new computer product coming into China gets inspected for CCC compliance, but I wonder to what degree they care about a new exported product. It is a sort of crypto brute forcing hardware though, so if any technology arouses suspicion on export, it would be this.
this machine will not get CCC compliance for it's not on sale in public, it'll be export as a product for academic research or just for some test, Chinese customs very busy, no Chinese will mark a machine as for decryption, that will guild much trouble to u. and that's just the way i sent package to my customers, of course not ASIC machine.
as i know, DHL from China to USA is fast, to Europe is fast, even to Africa just need 3-5 days, EMS is slower, but 7 working days r enough to any country. so...maybe the package is really shipped by a ship?