When it comes to business stories, the word "competition" is never inseparable. Both belong to China's overseas platforms, whether it is Temu or SHEIN, they have gone to the extreme in their respective fields, looking at the recent new measures of the two in the US market, the business tentacles of both sides are constantly extending, and it is inevitable to meet on a narrow road. But in November of this year, SHEIN and TEMU had just reached a settlement: SHEIN dropped the lawsuit against Temu's parent company, Pinduoduo;Temu also voluntarily withdrew its legal action against SHEIN. Now, less than a month away from this "great reconciliation", the dispute between the two sides has reappeared, which has aroused widespread concern. On December 14, Pinduoduo's cross-border e-commerce platform Temu filed a lawsuit again in the United StatesAccusations that SHEIN is increasingly anti-competitive against Temu. The Paper reported that a person close to SHEIN said:Temu has not only been plagiarizing SHEIN's own brand products on a large scale, but also continues to engage in unfair competitionIt also reverses black and white, thieves shout to catch thieves, and attempts to retaliate and smear with malicious lawsuits, SHEIN will never compromise on this despicable behavior, and will actively respond to the lawsuit and resolutely protect its legitimate rights through legal means. Both U.S. and U.K. courts have issued urgent temporary restraining orders against Temu for infringing SHEIN. 
Judging from the timeline, the dispute between Temu and SHEIN can be traced back to the time when Temu landed in the U.S. market last year. In September 2022, the menacing Temu launched a "tug-of-war" with SHEIN at the beginning of its launch: not only opened an office within 100 meters of its Guangzhou and poached employees and businessmen, Temu was accused of listing many of the same products on the SHEIN platform on the platform, and also reduced ** by more than 20%. It is rumored that Temu also got the list of Shein's ** merchants. So in December 2022, SHEIN launched TEMU to deliberately step on and slander SHEIN in social ** and online promotion, and plagiarize and infringe SHEIN brands and products. According to SHEIN's complaint,Temu has systematically plagiarized the design and copyright of SHEIN's own brand in a large and systematic manner, and has seriously infringed on the trademark rights and copyrights of SHEIN's own brand. Not only that, Temu also engaged in unfair competition by registering fake SHEIN social media accounts, selling counterfeit SHEIN brand goods, and spreading false news that slandered SHEIN. Subsequently, Temu launched a counterclaim. In July this year, Temu filed a new lawsuit against SHEIN in federal court in Boston, accusing it of violating U.S. antitrust laws and using market power to prevent these manufacturers from cooperating with Temu. Shein responded at the time that "Temu's lawsuit has no legal basis". There has been no progress in Temu's lawsuit, while SHEIN's infringement allegations against Temu have been answered by US and UK courts. On August 1stA U.S. FEDERAL COURT GRANTED AN URGENT TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER AGAINST TEMUto force Temu to stop "continuing to infringe" copyrights related to SHEIN. According to court documents, Temu's infringements over the past few months have included extensive copying of copyrighted clothing designs and patterns on the Shein platformRepeatedly ignoring the infringement notices (DMCA notices) issued by SHEIN, delaying the removal of infringing products from the shelves, or re-listing the products after slight modifications to the product design, so as to maximize illegal sales;Misleading use of fake SHEIN logos in the title of Temu's web pages, etc. In September of this year,An emergency temporary restraining order was also granted to TEMU by an English court, requiring it to stop the infringement of SHEIN. 
It can be seen from the pleadings of both parties that the clothing field is one of the focuses of competition between the two parties, but there are differences between TEMU and SHEIN in terms of models. temu is a full-category platform, and the relationship between clothing merchants and temu platform is the relationship between supply and salesIn addition to the goods of third-party sellers on the platform, there are also some products of SHEIN's own brand, and the cooperation between SHEIN's own clothing brand and clothing factories is similar to the relationship between ZARA and ** merchants, the factory needs to supply in accordance with the standards and requirements given by the SHEIN brand, without SHEIN's consent and authorization, ** merchants cannot provide SHEIN brand products and ** for other third parties without authorization. Blue Whale Finance found after an in-depth visit to the garment factory in Guangzhou:The cooperation between TEMU and SHEIN and the ** merchants is two models, and the latter cooperates more closely with the ** merchantsIt not only provides a digital system to transform the factory, but also takes out subsidies to do standardized factory transformation for gold medal merchants, with a subsidy of 120 yuan per square meter, and a 7,000-square-meter factory will receive a subsidy of more than 800,000 yuan. Although SHEIN is also expanding its categories and models, it is first and foremost a fast fashion brand outside the attributes of a cross-border e-commerce platform, just like Zara in Spain and Uniqlo in Japan. This identity determines the relationship between SHEIN and clothing manufacturers, which is different from other homes. In the view of Blue Whale Finance,The relationship between SHEIN and ** business is a solid business partnership. Temu merchants, on the other hand, are simpler business partnerships. According to this, some industry insiders pointed out that Temu allows clothing merchants to sell the same products of SHEIN's own brand at a lower ** on the platform, which is in fact an infringement. It is worth mentioning that in addition to SHEIN, according to many sellers, many Amazon sellers have also launched large-scale complaints to temu this year. 
Everyone in the circle knows,The brand awareness of temu merchants is generally weak, and the platform's supervision of this aspect is insufficient, and the phenomenon of product theft, plagiarism, and infringement on temu continues to ferment, because the "plagiarized version" of the product is lower, the sales volume often far exceeds the genuine version, which often makes many Amazon sellers overwhelmed, and can only raise the law one after another to protect their own interests. Fitbeast, a Chinese brand that specializes in sports equipment, took Temu to court in May. According to the lawsuit, Fitbeast found it priced at $25 on AmazonA product for $99 costs less than $5 for the same model on Temu. For this reason, Fitbeast believes that Temu and the Merchant have copied and ** these products, infringed the brand copyright and caused damage to their sales. Another Shenzhen-based Amazon seller, Xiao Zhang (pseudonym), also sued Temu in April this year. It is understood that Xiao Zhang did not sell products on the temu platform, but found his company's pirated products on it, which originally cost nearly $30 on the Amazon platform, but sold for about $5 on temu. For this reason, Xiao Zhang also believes that TEMU is suspected of infringement. According to Wired,Some Amazon sellers found that their monthly sales of popular products fell by more than two percent, and they believe that this is likely to be related to the fact that Temu has put the same model on the shelves at a lower price. Amazon strongly condemns this and encourages sellers to contact the platform's legal department. Prior to this, "Late" also reported that Amazon publicly encouraged dozens of "Amazon sellers who found the same ** and description of their products on temu" to defend their rights. 
In addition, according to Jiemian News, from January to October 2023, Temu received about 170 copyright revocation notices every day. In October this year, many sellers also broke the news that a large number of temu products suspected of infringement and lack of compliance certificates were removed from the shelves by temu due to large-scale complaints from sellers on Amazon and other platforms. However, as of mid-December, there are still many Amazon sellers on major social platforms who have reported that their products have been stolen and infringed by products on temu, which is enough to be visibleAt present, TEMU does not have a perfect management system for the proliferation of infringing products on the platform. Even industry insiders in foreign media have sharply pointed out:Temu is using legal action as a public relations tool. When asked if Temu is using legal action as a PR strategy, the person on LinkedIn who profiles as Temu's "PR consultant" said they didn't comment, but I think you got to the point. And an executive at a PR agency that works with global brands also said: "It feels like they're trying to do a brazen stunt, but it's not doing it right, and I almost feel like they're trying to piece together a lot of meaningless puzzle pieces." 
to foreign media.
Based on this, in response to Temu's lawsuit against SHEIN, not only many Amazon sellers have said that Temu's move is "rushing to the doctor". In addition, some sellers have seen the hidden risks behind the soaring growth of some Chinese overseas platforms from the competition between the two sides: the temu platform just thinks about merchants, plagiarism, and low prices, and it is definitely good to start in a short period of time, but the merchants' counterattack and legal sanctions may become a great business risk for its future development. 
As the cross-border e-commerce industry enters a new stage of development, in the face of increasingly scarce market resources, the smoke of gunpowder has long been permeated to the invisible battlefield of going to sea. However, while pursuing market share and profits, China's overseas e-commerce platforms are also facing a series of challenges, such as legal and policy risks. Some sellers pointed out that in the increasingly fierce competition in the international market, Chinese companies cannot avoid competition, but this competition should be on the basis of legal complianceA large-scale intellectual property infringement like temu will inevitably attract the attention of local regulators, bringing more regulatory pressure on Chinese brands to go overseas. As a seller on each platform, you should be vigilant, operate legally and compliantly, and do not passively get involved in such a situation, in case the platform finally pushes the responsibility to the merchant. There are also sellers who said earnestly: the risks and opportunities of going to sea coexist, and it is the least smart practice to roll up your own people, and in the end, it may be the entire domestic industrial chain and the merchants above. In the face of increasingly fierce competition in the cross-border e-commerce market, Chinese enterprises want to go overseas to seize the upward development opportunities, only to take compliance as the spear, intellectual property rights as the shield, and run towards long-termism on the road of insisting on building core competitiveness: on the one hand, under the increasingly strict overseas regulatory trend, "compliance and legal operation" has become the premise for Chinese enterprises to go overseas, among which the protection of brand intellectual property rights is the top priority, and the international market attaches great importance to the protection of their own brandsStrengthening the protection of intellectual property rights is not only the first priority for enterprises to comply with overseas markets, but also an important task to maintain the brand image of Made in China. On the other hand, with the end of the era of savage growth,In an increasingly competitive international market, Chinese companies should avoid homogeneous involution regardless of costBecause although the extremely low price can quickly attract traffic, if the quality of the goods on the platform is worrying, or even piracy is rampant, then it is not only difficult to keep the traffic sticky, but it may also damage the image of Made in China. Therefore, for Chinese enterprises going overseas,Continuously improving its core and comprehensive competitiveness and building a benign and orderly competitive industry ecology is the long-term driving force for continuous soaring overseas.