Media Updates, page-12904

I'm not even sure what daigou market really looks like these days to be honest.

At first it was the suitcase trade, which was progressively consumed by larger corporate daigou. The smaller resellers were wiped out by COVID whereas the large corporate daigou survived, only to cause major problems for the IF companies relying on them. AZ Global is a key example, if you follow what's going on at BUB right now. They seem to have been at the epicentre of the inventory problems with A2M in 2020-2021 and it's happened again over there.

When A2M cut out AZ Global/A2 Andy it was because they would not give him the same kind of preferential treatment they they had in the past under Peter Nathan, i.e. better wholesale pricing, incentives etc. That enabled heavier discounting across the reseller market and ultimately diminished A2's pricing in CBEC channels as well.

Now the daigou resellers A2M deal with do not receive the same treatment, it should mean that there is less of a price difference between buying through a daigou or through CBEC. Buying a tin of Stage 3 through CBEC costs around $45-50. I'm not sure what it would cost through a daigou but I imagine similar, if not more. From A2M's perspective the daigou route is still much better margin but higher risk due to the cross-channel effects that can occur and visibility of inventory.

There are still reasons why a Chinese customer would pay the same or even more though - for instance, for provenance and authenticity - they may trust the daigou as an individual who is taking the product off the shelf in Australia, recording the whole process, etc. I guess it depends on the level of personalised treatment they receive. Others with closer proximity to this industry in its current form might have a better perspective though.