Personally I trust couriers like DHL or Fedex above EMS - but that's not based on any particular rational evidence, I'll admit - just gut feeling.  (And I have *zero* knowledge about shipping to/from countries outside of Western Europe and North America)

EMS is the Express Mail Service - a cooperative owned by national postal services.  The normal process would be that the package will be handled by the sending country's postal service, then handed over to the EMS cooperative for internaional shipment, and finally handed over to the national postal service in the destination country.

With a service like DHL you'd normally expect the package would remain with DHL from collection to delivery (although in China, who knows).

Since EMS shipments actually involve three organisations (EMS plus two national postal services) it will depend to a large part on how good (or bad) the national postal services are in sending and receiving countries; so Avalon EMS experiences may well vary widely depending on the country of the recipient.

roy