Guangzhou Customs cracked a major milk powder smuggling case involving over 1 billion yuan

According to CCTV News, Guangzhou Customs recently launched a special operation and successfully cracked down on four criminal gangs that smuggled milk powder through cross-border e-commerce and postal channels, arrested 15 criminal suspects, and the amount involved was about 1 billion yuan.

On that day, Guangzhou Customs dispatched a total of 178 customs police officers, divided into 30 groups, to carry out unified investigation and arrest operations in Shanghai, Wuhan, Changsha, Shenzhen and other places. During the search, the anti-smuggling police found that the gang leader's computer contained a large amount of user information from all over the country who bought milk powder from him. Many company documents and computers recorded and stored important evidence such as orders and user information of Song's gang suspected of smuggling milk powder.

The chief of the investigation section of the Nansha branch of the Guangzhou Customs Anti-smuggling Bureau said that these people have multiple companies under their names and have registered multiple cross-border e-commerce platforms. They use these cross-border e-commerce platforms to collect information on customers in China who need milk powder, that is, those who falsely report the trade methods used to import milk powder, and make profits from it.

These people would falsely declare milk powder that should have been imported through the postal channel as cross-border e-commerce and report it to the customs. In this process, the price of milk powder was reported to the customs at 60% of the actual transaction price, further reducing the import cost and evading the payable tariffs.

Subsequently, anti-smuggling police found a large amount of imported milk powder from New Zealand without legal and regulatory procedures in one of their warehouses. After counting, there were more than 170,000 cans in total.

Milk powder has always been an important commodity in China's imported goods. Especially after the "melamine" incident, domestic milk powder fell into a crisis of trust. Imported milk powder became one of the most popular products on the market for a time. In addition, milk powder is a high-profit product with higher technical barriers and extremely strong functional attributes. There is no need to worry about sales or losses, so a large number of cross-border import sellers have poured into this industry.

However, with the increase in supervision in recent years, domestic milk powder is gradually becoming more high-end, with strict controls on milk source quality, brand marketing image and other aspects, and effective use of marketing to shape a high-end product image and enter the high-end milk powder consumption market. Domestic consumers are also gradually regaining their trust in domestic milk powder.

According to data from Euromonitor, an internationally renowned consulting firm , in 2019, the top three companies in China's milk powder market had a market share of 36.9%, among which the domestic proportion of the top ten milk powder brands increased from 20% in 2016 to 36% in 2019, and domestic milk powder grew rapidly.

import

E-commerce platform

Cross-border e-commerce market