Shopee is still safe… for now.
After a series of notices by different companies like Lenovo and POCO, there seems to be a rumor going around that the Bureau of Customs has modified its policies when it comes to grey units. It appears that the NTC wants manufacturers to sell phones that have been approved by them. This means, goodbye to China ROM phones.
We’ve come to notice this when our colleague, Pinoy TechDad, posted on his Facebook page about Lenovo sending a notice stating that they will no longer sell any China-only smartphones priced above PHP 10,000 due to Philippines customs restricting “all cross-border stores from selling mobile phones and tablets”.
It’s not just Lenovo though. As we said, POCO started delisting their smartphones and only sells accessories such as the POCO Watch and BlackShark FunCooler. The homepage still has links for their smartphones like the POCO M5 but clicking it will lead to a dead-end. Don’t fret, POCO’s Shopee is still intact and has many of their phones listed.
We also posted on Facebook about the matter. Because of this, we may recommend many grey units, such as the Pixel phones and the OnePlus Ace, less. We’re currently contacting different manufacturers about this issue.
Lazada’s Logistics team has also apparently posted about this notice and said that any package that was ordered prior to this customs change would be intercepted and returned back to their respective sellers. The Bureau of Customs has not posted yet about these new policies but once they do, we’ll keep you updated.
The POCO F5 would launch soon officially in the Philippines and we still don’t know whether that phone is affected by this or not. If it is, then the phone would only be sold to Shopee.
This is a developing story.
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