Fake Chinese dietary supplements, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics have been smuggled into Vietnam in large quantities this year, a national committee on anti-smuggling said at a conference last Friday.

They have been illegally transported in bulk in a more sophisticated way than before, the National Steering Committee on Combating Smuggling, Commercial Fraud, and Counterfeit Goods (Steering Committee 389) said during the event in Hoi An City in the central region.

However, the Steering Committee 389 did not give any details about the volume of fake Chinese dietary supplements, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics imported into Vietnam at the conference on finding solutions for coping with counterfeit goods and products infringing intellectual property rights.

Many Vietnamese enterprises have registered their brand names identical to existing protected trademarks to deceive consumers into buying their fake dietary supplements, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics, the committee said.

Those local firms mainly outsource their products, labels, and packages from Chinese manufacturing facilities, and then smuggle the goods into Vietnam for repackaging and reselling, with “Made in Vietnam” labels stuck on the surface.

The Steering Committee 389 has discovered a local firm storing 80 kinds of labels and packages for dietary supplements printed in China, and then importing them into Vietnam so that it could flexibly label and repackage bogus products for reselling domestically.

Hanoi police earlier this month found a Vietnamese company employing a similar trick, seizing over 20 metric tons of fake goods and detaining three people involved in the case.

In May, Steering Committee 389 data showed that Vietnam imported a huge volume of dietary supplements, mostly from China, worth more than VND2.4 trillion (US$110.4 million) last year.

In the first five months of this year, with nearly 500 registered local importers, the value of the dietary supplements brought into Vietnam from many sources, including China, topped VND1.4 trillion ($64.4 million).

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