Unsafe fat bikes smuggled from China through Rotterdam port on large scale: report

Tens of thousands of unsafe fat bikes are being smuggled from China to Rotterdam and other European ports, AD reports based on its own research. Chinese importers avoid the authorities and anti-dump levies by listing the fat bike shipments as furniture or televisions, for example.

The newspaper spoke to multiple sellers on Bol.com and Makrtplaats, among others, offering no-name fat bikes at prices as low as 599 euros. Legal manufacturers and e-bike experts are dismayed, warning that these Chinese fat bikes are often disguised scooters with an engine up to three times more powerful than the permitted 250 Watts.

They are even more surprised by the price. The European Union has had sky-high import duties on Chinese bicycles since 1993 and expanded them to e-bikes in 2018. These anti-dump duties, intended to prevent the European market from being flooded, range from 50 to 83 percent. China produces some 200 million bicycles and e-bikes a year. The Fuji-ta factory alone produces over 25 million bicycles, more than the entire Europea annual sales.

There is no way to legally offer a fat bike for 699 euros, Niels Willems, director of fat bike manufacturer BREKR, told AD. “Take a fat bike for 900 euros. If you deduct the import duties, VAT, and profit margin, such a fat bike must have been built for 110 dollars. That is impossible, even in China, where they produce very competitively.”

Importers are avoiding these anti-dumping levies in all kinds of ways, Jikke Biermasz, a lawyer at the Rotterdam firm Ploum and expert in anti-dumping, told the newspaper. “For example, by putting a different country of origin on the load. Another way is to set up factories in other countries, where little happens afterward.” Once the bikes have entered Europe, they disappear into storage facilities in the Netherlands and Germany, among other places, and then get sold illegally online.

“We have seen that e-bikes, including fat bikes, have entered the EU illegally. In Rotterdam, for example, but also in other European ports,” Pierluigu Caterino of the European anti-fraud agency Olaf told AD. Olaf has imposed some 200 million euros in late anti-dumping levies but expects it’s only intercepting a fraction of the illegal fat bikes.