SY demands “Temuing” be reined in

Suomen Yrittäjät, the Finnish SME association, demands swift action from Parliament to rein in cheap Chinese e-retailers.

On 5 February, the European Commission published a news article proposing action to meet the challenges of e-commerce imports form non-EU countries. Suomen Yrittäjät has submitted its own statement on the news article to the Finnish Parliament.

“Temuing” refers to ordering goods from cheap e-retailers in non-EU countries, such as Temu and Shein. The prices are low, but the products’ safety cannot be practically monitored in the EU.

“Every day, 12 million packages arrive in the EU which are duty-free, as they are worth under €150. Many of the products in those packages do not conform to EU standards,” says Sanna Lempiäinen, a specialist and lawyer at Suomen Yrittäjät.

“It’s clear that we need rules here. It’s clear that a process at the EU level will take time, so perhaps in Finland it’s time to think whether we could react faster at the national level to bring the situation under control,” says Janne Ylinen, chair of the Suomen Yrittäjät retail committee and owner of Kokkolan Halpahalli Oy.

Ethics largest concern

At the start of February, Finnish Customs said that 28.2 million small packages were ordered from outside the EU to Finland last year. In two years, the number of packages has increased 35-fold. The primary sources of packages are the Chinese e-retailers Temu, Shein and AliExpress.

“That’s a significant share of online retail as a whole. What makes the situation problematic is that Chinese e-retailers get special treatment in the EU. They should be on the same level as importers within the EU,” Ylinen says.

Kokkolan Halpahalli has ordered products from China for years, but as it conforms to EU rules, the company considers its operations responsible.

“The biggest concern with how Chinese e-retailers act has to do with product ethicality. People order products without knowing things about their origin or quality. Finnish and European players have criteria they must adhere to.”

“This is a question of European and Finnish retailers’ competitiveness, as e-retailers and platforms operating abroad do not contribute fully to things like waste management costs. The safety of EU and Finnish products is monitored very closely, but there are not enough supervisory resources for the volume of packages coming from China,” Lempiäinen of Suomen Yrittäjät says.

“Customs’ resources must be secured”

The European Commission suggests several measures to tackle the problems observed. Suomen Yrittäjät says that several of the proposed measures will take a long time to implement.

“One commendable proposal is to scrap the duty-free status on low value goods, that is, those worth less than €150,” Lempiäinen says.

She says that national monitoring should be beefed up. This would mean securing the supervisory resources of Finnish Customs.

“Politicians must the quick decisions on this no later than at the mid-term budget negotiations. We need targeted measures to secure the competitiveness of Finnish retailers,” Lempiäinen says.

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