Temu owner PDD, Alibaba slip as White House vows ‘de minimis’ shipment crackdown

Shares of Temu owner PDD Holdings (PDD) and Alibaba (BABA) are lower in premarket trading after the Biden administration announced steps to crack down on a trade loophole favored by Chinese retailers to send cheap packages into the U.S. The Biden-Harris Administration announced it is “taking new actions to enforce our laws and protect American consumers, workers, and businesses by addressing the significant increased abuse of the de minimis exemption, in particular China-founded e-commerce platforms, and strengthening efforts to target and block shipments that violate U.S. laws.” The White House added in a fact sheet on the matter: “Over the last ten years, the number of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption has increased significantly, from approximately 140 million a year to over one billion a year. This exponential increase in de minimis shipments makes it more challenging to enforce U.S. trade laws, health and safety requirements, intellectual property rights, consumer protection rules, and to block illicit synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and synthetic drug raw materials and machinery from entering the country. The majority of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption originate from several China-founded e-commerce platforms, putting American consumers at risk, undercutting American workers and businesses, and resulting in the importation of huge volumes of low-value products such as textiles and apparel into the U.S. market duty-free.” Near 8 a.m. in New York, PDD shares have declined about 5%, while those of Alibaba, which also sells internationally via its AliExpress site, have fallen a bit over 1%.