South Korea, China's AliExpress, and Temu Forge Critical Safety Pact

South Korea and China's leading e-commerce platforms, AliExpress and Temu, are forming a pact to enhance safety standards across online markets. Rising safety concerns spark the move.

Role of AliExpress and Temu in Enhancing Safety

As reported by Reuters, the South Korean government and the local branches of PDD Holdings' Temu and Alibaba's AliExpress signed an agreement on Monday to improve product safety, as stated by the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC).

The deal follows increased regulatory scrutiny of Chinese e-commerce platforms, such as Temu and AliExpress, as they significantly increase 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," KFTC stated.

Qin Sun, the co-founder of Temu, and Ray Zhang, the CEO of AliExpress Korea, attended the signing ceremony on Monday.

As part of the deal, the KFTC will gather information about harmful goods and send it to AliExpress and Temu. These sites will then share this information with sellers and buyers. The government will also check to see if the sites have stopped selling harmful goods.

The Future of E-Commerce Safety with AliExpress and Temu

The KFTC said that this is the first time Temu has signed a private agreement like this anywhere in the world. However, the European Union and Australia have used similar contracts to regulate the sale of dangerous goods online.

According to Euromonitor data, South Korea's e-commerce market is the fourth-biggest globally, trailing only China, the United States, and the United Kingdom and exceeding Japan's market despite having just the 29th largest population.

According to the KFTC, the number of users of AliExpress and Temu in South Korea has skyrocketed to 8.87 million and 8.29 million, respectively, as of March 2024, surpassing the number of users of domestic shopping platforms like 11st, which has 7.4 million users.

Temu has shown remarkably rapid growth after its July 2018 launch into the South Korean market.

Temu formed its Korean company earlier in February. Still, according to The Korea Herald, it has yet to formally open a physical location or recruit staff specifically for the Korean office. AliExpress has been attempting to strengthen its position in Korea in recent months. It has expanded its staff and moved its office to Gangnam, in southern Seoul.

According to Statistics Korea, South Korea's e-commerce purchases from abroad increased from 5.3 trillion won in 2022 to 6.8 trillion won ($4.97 billion) in 2023.

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