Second hand goods are purchased in China and smuggled into Vietnam where more and more consumers are happy to buy genuine goods at discount prices.

Pham Minh San and his wife rise at dawn and prepare to embark on an epic journey. The couple will first catch a local tour bus to Lang Son province before crossing the Chinese border and heading for Nanning city, roughly 800km from the capital of Vietnam. The couple will then travel onto Guangzhou city. There the couple will have no time to rest. They will immediately hit the local shopping markets and stock up on second-hand clothes, which will be illegally shipped back to Hanoi and sold.

Amazingly, San has been making this journey on average twice a month for five years. “You can save up to 50 per cent on the cost of some goods, if you buy them directly in China,” San says. With Vietnam’s Tet festival (Lunar New Year) coming, San says that hundreds of traders are travelling to China every day on a similar mission.

“In China, people from all over the world can buy all types of goods and place orders for both genuine and imitation products,” says San, who can’t speak Chinese. “You can use body language or hand signs to haggle. But if you are a regular client, haggling is not necessary. You just place the order and it will be transported several days later.”

Second-hand and counterfeit clothes, footwear and electronic products are flooding the Vietnamese market despite the practice being illegal. Every year the number of shops selling second hand goods from China rises with demand before Tet. All along roads such as Le Duan in the capital city you can find shops selling second hand and counterfeit goods supposedly made by Nike, D&G, Versace, Gucci, Calvin Klein or Adidas.

According to some shopkeepers here, most of the second-hand items were originally sent to Cambodia as aid packages before being imported to Vietnam. Traders hire porters to smuggle the packages over the border at a price of VND100,000-VND200,000 ($5.4-$10.8) per package.

Back in the early 1990s, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) collected second-hand clothes in developed countries for aid work missions in developing countries. That is why second hand clothes in Vietnam picked up the tag “hang sida” (SIDA goods). However, SIDA also means AIDS in Vietnamese (the term is borrowed from the French word SIDA). So some Vietnamese misunderstood the term “hang SIDA” implied the clothes had come from people who had died of AIDS.

As a result second-hand clothes were stigmatised. But second-hand clothes have in recent times become a more acceptable product and are now referred to as “hang thung”, which means “cargo goods”.

Shopping spree

Nguyen Minh Nguyet pulls up on her $8,300- SH scooter outside a second-hand clothes shop on Hoang Quoc Viet street and starts to rummage around in a pile of second-hand clothes with a number of other women. The shop owner sits on a high chair like a tennis umpire. Meanwhile his employees talk up the quality and low prices of the used items to customers.

“Those are quite new and were imported just yesterday,” the owner tells Nguyet as she holds up a coat.

“Ok, how much?” she asks.

“VND300,000 ($16.2) – no discount!” the shopkeeper replies.

A few seconds later he accepts VND270,000 ($14.79) for the coat without even looking at his customer. Nguyet claims she actually prefers shopping in second hand clothes stores where she is left alone by the shop assistants. “New goods may be well made, but they are everywhere. Here I can find something rare or unique,” she says.

At another shop on Nghia Tan street, the owner Nguyen Van Tu refuses to talk until I buy something; a professional hazard for any journalist in Vietnam. After I buy a pair of pants, he tells me how he’s sold second-hand goods for nine years. Previously his biggest customers were cash strapped students or casual labourers.

“I started traveling to China where I discovered that I could make a killing from selling made-in-China second hand and counterfeit goods,” he says. “Now both poor and rich people come here.”

Nguyen Bich Nga, a student from National University of Hanoi comes to second-hand clothes shops because the products are cheap.

“Low prices are what interest me most. Sometimes, I can find products by famous brand-names. If you have a sharp eye and plenty of time you can find some unique items,” says Nga in a shop on Nghia Tan street.
The shops with second hand goods will often hang signs that read “hang moi ve” (newly imported goods) or “hang thung hieu 100 per cent”, (100 per cent cargo goods).

But according to San, traders in Hanoi mix fake products with ‘genuine’ second hand products as the latter can be more expensive. As ever in Vietnam’s ‘thrift stores’ or markets, the best advice is buyer beware.

VietNamNet/Time-out