Shopping agents profit from ruble’s fall
Print Edition
IN Blagoveshchensk on Russia’s side of the Chinese border, Mou Jiani has turned her home into a warehouse, stocking up on Apple iPhones, handbags and milk powder to sell back home as Chinese shoppers take advantage of the ruble’s slide.
Chinese workers and overseas students in Russia have been buying goods at low prices caused by the steep fall in ruble rates before brands can adjust them.
These shopping “agents,” knows as daigou, stockpile the products before selling them at a profit to buyers back home.
“In the last few weeks more people have contacted me on messaging apps weibo and WeChat than I have time to reply to,” said Mou, a trading company worker, who acts as a daigou in her spare time.
The most popular items include smartphones, shoes, handbags and watches, she said.
Shoppers usually pay using Alibaba’s Alipay system on her personal Taobao website, after which she ships the products back to China. Her website received over 3,000 visits on Thursday, a sharp rise from previous levels, she said.
Firms have moved to hike prices or even halt sales, but nifty shoppers have still been able to buy up products on the cheap. A Louis Vuitton bag in Russia cost just over half the Chinese price on Wednesday, one daigou said.
These shopping agents are not new for Chinese shoppers, who often look abroad to buy luxury items to bypass steep import taxes at home.
However, posts on China’s weibo asking about “Russian daigou” soared this month to nearly 10,000 from a couple of hundred each month before.
“I hear buying luxury goods is as cheap as buying cabbage,” one weibo user wrote online on Thursday.
Other agents said Chinese shopper numbers started to spike after the ruble fell 11 percent against the dollar on Tuesday. It is down around 45 percent this year.
Walking around Moscow’s upmarket GUM department store on Red Square, a Chinese student who wrote her name as Chzhen Khuey, 24, said buying goods in Russia for stores in China was a lucrative business.
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