SOUTH Korea’s government signed an agreement on Monday (May 13) with the local units of Alibaba’s AliExpress and PDD Holdings’ Temu to promote product safety, the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said.
The agreement comes after heightened regulatory scrutiny of AliExpress, Temu and other Chinese e-commerce platforms as they significantly expand their user base in South Korea.
“Recently conducted safety inspections on products such as those for children sold on the AliExpress and Temu platforms detected a large amount of substances harmful to the human body, seriously threatening consumer safety” and making the agreement necessary, trade watchdog KFTC said.
Ray Zhang, CEO of AliExpress Korea, and Qin Sun, co-founder of Temu, were present at the signing ceremony on Monday.
Under the agreement, KFTC will collect data on harmful products and provide them to AliExpress and Temu, which will inform sellers and consumers. The government will also check whether harmful products have been blocked from sale by the platforms.
It is the first time Temu has signed such a voluntary agreement anywhere in the world, the KFTC said, although other areas such as the European Union and Australia have histories of regulating dangerous products sold on online platforms through such agreements.
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South Korea’s e-commerce market punches far above its weight as the fourth-largest in the world according to Euromonitor data, only behind China, the US and the United Kingdom and bigger than Japan’s market, despite having only the 29th largest population in the world.
The number of AliExpress and Temu users in South Korea has ballooned to 8.87 million and 8.29 million, respectively, as of March 2024, ahead of domestic shopping platforms such as 11st’s 7.4 million users, according to the KFTC.
The growth rate is especially fast for Temu, which entered the South Korean market in July last year.
South Korean e-commerce purchases from overseas have jumped to 6.8 trillion won (S$6.9 billion) in 2023 from 5.3 trillion won in 2022, according to Statistics Korea. REUTERS
