Many gold jewelry products currently marketed to Vietnamese consumers as Italian imports are in fact Chinese-faked products of dubious gold purity, Nguoi Lao Dong newspaper reported.
Such products have won many consumers over thanks to their sophisticated and attractive designs and their competitive prices, compared with the locally-made counterparts.
However, insiders in the jewelry industry said the products are not made in Italy but are in fact manufactured in China and brought into the country through the informal cross-border trade between Vietnam and China, under fake Italian brands.
“Authentic Italian jewelries are far more costly,” a jewelry maker was quoted by Nguoi Lao Dong as saying.
Other jewelry makers said Chinese manufacturers have purchased modern machinery and equipment to make jewelry products copying Italian designs en mass.
Recently, some local jewelry makers have also imported modern technology and machinery to fake foreign products to sell in the market, they added.
An employee of a jewelry company said although gold jewelry is supposed to be made of 18-carat gold, or 75 percent pure gold, those available on the market are only 60 to 65 percent in purity.
“They have taken advantage of the products’ attractive designs to mislead the customers about the purity of the gold content,” he said.
“There are cases when a jewelry made from 14-carat gold is sold at the price for 18-carat gold, but few customers can tell the difference.”
The head of a gold trading company said customers who bought unbranded gold jewelries often incur losses if they later wanted to sell their possessions.
“The gold shops will buy white gold or diamond jewelries without brand names at a price 30 percent lower than the market rates,” he said.
Linh, a resident in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 3, said recently when she took her white gold necklace back to the jewelry shop where she had bought it, the shop refused to buy it back at the original price she had paid for.
“They said they could not buy it back at the original price since the necklace was imported without warranty,” she said.
Gold purity fraud
Nguyen Thi Cuc, deputy CEO of Phu Nhuan Jewelry Co, warned that Chinese jewelry manufacturers often tried to impress the customers with attractive, sophisticated designs to hide the products’ below-par gold content.
The Mekong Delta provinces are currently the main markets for these products, Cuc added.
According to the head of a jewelry department of a gold company based in HCMC, some local businesses have recently released on the markets many low-priced jewelries made of 10-carat and 14-carat gold that can compete with Chinese products made of 18-carat or 24-carat gold in terms of design and sophistication of techniques.
“Some of these businesses even asked us to produce 5-carat gold for them to use in making jewelry,” he said.
“But such products cannot be called gold jewelry because the gold content is only 20 percent.”
Another head of a gold trading company in HCMC said his company recently had to cancel an order on processing gold.
“Our Hanoi-based partner wanted us to sell them ‘18-carat gold’ that has the purity level of only 60 percent, as opposed to the proper level of 75 percent,” he said.
Print
