cbigsup, Gong has a hard time producing enough for the French market, so they are not actively seeking distributors abroad.
Area10, yes, this was in 2010 and before, where Gong was using a factory in tunisia that was run by its hostile competitors. Basically, H20 (the group owning Gong) went bankrupt in 2008, and Patrice bought Gong then. But the deal left a lot of bad feelings and resentments, and the factory played a lot of dirty tricks to Gong, such as not even telling Patrice when the container were shipped or even what was the contents. So Patrice had to discover that a container existed when it arrived at port... Add to this banks not lending money anymore to small businesses after the crisis, some rough edges to Patrice personality (he didn't gain his nickname of "The Bear" for nothing :-), some paranoia due to the latent guerilla with his ex-associates, that made him not disclose these problems to customers, and so before 2010, delays to get a board were unpredictable, even to Patrice himself. I myself waited more than a year for a board model that ended up being cancelled.
To get an idea of the problem, Decathlon, the major French sport brand decided to get their boards made in this Tunisia factory, I even got incredible hate messages from Gong competitors in the tone of "Ah Ah we will now swamp the French market with thousands of Decathlon boards next month, Gong is dead!"... and guess what happened... Decathlon boards got delayed by one full year while the plant guys were bragging to me they were shipping next month.
But since 2011, Gong switched production to China, and being there quite often, he is able to manage the production properly as he has a lot more control, and 3 employees to help him (he was alone before). And he has now "opened up" a lot, and discloses freely the production schedules, what boards are planned in which container, delays, etc... on the Gong forum. See
www.gong-galaxy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=2567 And dates of shipment are now in the shop...
So yes, there was a lot of production delays issues before 2011, but it is over now. Production problems can still happen but at least they are dealt with openly now.