The Safely Sourcing China Blog

Parallel or Grey Importing & China

Firstly, with regards to a basic explanation of Parallel  or Grey Importing, and the scam effect, allow me to direct you to an article of mine which discusses this matter in the Scams & Scammers Category of my blog; the article is entitled “Games Consoles & XBOX in China“

I assume you’ve been and read it, and have now come back to continue.

So let’s get to my point.

Every region has its’ own official distributor(s) who are licensed and engaged to distribute for the producer into a given region.

That means, that even if you were to contact the relevant distributor for the Chinese market, that distributor would not allow me to purchase from him/her with the foreknowledge that you planned on having them shipped out of China, for fear of losing that very valuable license.

Even if they took that risk you’d only get them at wholesale in China, and by the time you’d payed for shipping, you’d probably have them held-up at customs at your end, or even impounded or confiscated, as companies are now on the march, with government assistance, to batten down the hatches on parallel or grey importing; as is evidenced by the rate at which these actions are now taking place in EU ports.

However, I don’t believe a genuine distributor would allow you to do that in the first instance.

Not for a heart-beat.

But that, in and of itself, isn’t the major issue – there’s more.

If he/she did agree, particularly with that foreknowledge, then you would have to suspect something dodgy was going; more dodgy than your request to the licensee to parallel or grey import these products into other regions of the world, not under his or her license mandate.

As you are perhaps aware, or perhaps not, China has a problem, in that foreign mafia regularly send people into China masquerading as representatives of very large corporations such as the Apple and Sony Corporations, and many others.

These people, then give product plans to their targeted Chinese companies and, after inspecting their factory, issue them with a fake license to produce and manufacture on behalf of these big names.

The Chinese companies genuinely believe that they are licensed to do so, as these mafia are very good at there jobs and have a strong financial backing to support their claims. They’re professionals.

They then go on to set up or give people (probably there own) “license” to act as “official distributors”.

However, when once YOU buy these goods (because that’s what even many chain stores end up buying) and sell them on, your own prospective client may find, should a problem arise, that their product identification codes do not coincide with those on the company database, and will be left without warranty, on a product that is a clone; and so will be left without recourse, but to turn back to you, who would then look back to the “distributor or licensed agent“, who in turn would have to look back to the “licensed manufactory” here.

ONLY TO DISCOVER THAT YOU, AND THEMSELVES, HAVE BEEN DUPED!

And that is exactly what is happening, and, morally speaking – in terms of the duty we owe to our prospective buyers, I really think you’d be better off out of it.

It’s a morass. It really isn’t a fun pool to swim in.

There are, however, a lot of legitimate high quality, great design, top of the range, as it were, “no-name” OEM/ODM products available, which compare technologically very well with many of the “big brands”.

Anecdotaly, I have a nice little Chinese made no-name 1 GB USB memory stick I bought here in Beijing, in a tech market, about two years ago. It’s great. I was shocked to discover one day that I’d had the thing in my pocket when my trousers went into a 3 cycle wash and spin.

When hanging out my clothes to dry I discovered it with a yelp, thinking, “That’s buggered then”. I put in a shelf for a day or so, then picked it up and stuck it in my computer in the forlorn hope that it might just work.

To my surprise, it opened up a window in the blink of an eye, as it usually did.

In fact, a large number of clients have brought data on USB sticks with big brand names, and they all open slower than my little no-namer, which is Blitz fast.

Anecdotes aside: My moral sense of what is right and wrong, in respect to the end user or buyer, baulks at the idea of even considering the potential risk to them as buyers, and to my personal sense of honour. Yes, some of still hold onto that old fashioned notion. Quaint, huh?

For me, it has always been about the road I take, and not simply attaining the final destination, without due consideration as to how I get there. I have always wanted to arrive at, or achieve, my destinations and goals – whole, intact, and more of, NOT LESS than, a person than I when I started out on the journey or undertaking.

International mafias are very pervasive and convincing.

Not my cup of tea I’m afraid.

The above mentioned scenarios are equally true for big brand apparel, trainers, cameras, and computers etc.

“Welcome to the real.”

Or…. not….

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Originally posted 2009-08-13 06:52:11. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Tags: apple, Asia, b2b, business, china, china product sourcing, European Union, games consoles, grey import, grey importing, Grey market, import export, international trade, iphone, parallel import, scam, scammed, scammer, sony, wholesale, xbox, Your China Trading Partner

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 7:45 PM and is filed under General Information, OEM And ODM, Scams And Scammers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.