YOOTECH：Under the supervision of the government, e-cigarettes are quietly growin

Can e-cigarettes really help you quit smoking? "Can!!!! It's a real way to quit traditional cigarettes.

Flavored fruit bombs, coupled with fashion labels such as "cool" and "trend", e-cigarettes are popular with many young people. While e-cigarettes have long been touted as a way to stop smoking among young people, little has been said about the risks of addiction.

More importantly, the harm of e-cigarettes to the health of minors was once ignored by e-cigarette enterprises. Until a number of scientific research evidence, as well as e-cigarettes harm to the physical and mental health of young people, frequent social news, caused enough attention from the regulatory authorities.

In recent years, the e-cigarette industry has finally put an end to its wild growth, as new regulations have been introduced to protect minors and the industry has become increasingly standardized. But there are still a lot of confusion in the industry, there are still a lot of practitioners take chances, for minors supply. From young people's hot new industry to the street rat, who is behind the e-cigarette explosion? E-cigarettes were supposed to help people quit smoking, but they ended up being a substitute for cigarettes.

Thus, e-cigarettes can help quit smoking is a false proposition. The Report on the Health risks of Smoking in China 2020, jointly released by the National Health Commission and the WHO Office in China, clearly states that e-cigarettes cannot help people quit smoking.

The latest e-cigarette regulation, which took effect in May, explicitly bans the sale of e-cigarettes to minors and the sale of "fruit-flavored" e-cigarettes. In the same month, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Standardization Administration issued mandatory national standards for e-cigarettes, stipulating that products should not be flavored with flavors other than tobacco. The regulation will take effect on October 1 this year.

The last hurrah for e-cigarette companies is a new national standard that gives them a five-month grace period. After the regulation was released in March, some e-cigarette manufacturers called on consumers to stock up on fruit-flavored bombs, citing the fact that they would stop production after May 1. One vapers bought 20 boxes of mixed flavor bombs.

E-cigarette sales have always been diversified. In its early days, e-cigarettes were widely promoted on e-commerce platforms such as Tmall and JD.com, as well as on mainstream social media, attracting young people to join the ranks of e-cigarette smokers. Online sales of e-cigarettes were already banned at the end of 2019 in an effort to further protect minors from e-cigarettes.

At present, e-cigarettes are mainly sold through offline channels. However, with the further restriction of new regulations at the beginning of this year, e-cigarettes are classified into tobacco management regulations, and offline stores must hold licenses to work, further narrowing the range of e-cigarettes that can be sold through channels. Industry insiders found that the current online channels are not blocked, offline channels also exist some gray areas.

"The brand side not only takes the goods to the provincial or municipal representative, but also supplies to the trading company in each place, which leads to many wechat business, wholesale, mobile phone repair people have channels to get the goods, and the market is quite chaotic." The e-cigarette store owner told Pai Finance that many of the smokers involved in the hoarding got their products from these sources.

When asked if they were selling other products, the customer service members said that they were "complete with food sticks". They could pick out the style and taste on wechat, then return to Taobao to place an order, and browse the wechat moments of the merchants. All kinds of e-cigarettes and fruit-flavored tobacco bombs are available.

Similar tactics can also be found on some second-hand trading platforms. Search for keywords such as "atomization" and "smoking cessation", and some e-cigarette products will still appear. Most of them are sold under the guise of "changing vests".

Compared with the two major channels of e-commerce and second-hand trading platform, the more uncontrollable channel is wechat business. At present, some consumers have locked wechat business as the main purchasing channel for e-cigarettes. Some consumers said that many wechat merchants are sales staff of offline e-cigarette stores, who simultaneously sell e-cigarettes in wechat moments to expand channels and sales volume. There are still some college students acting as agents, and they have stable clients, many of whom are middle school students and college students. At present, due to the COVID-19 lockdown, many students choose wechat to buy e-cigarettes without being asked about their age.

Wechat business has almost become a gray area outside of policy supervision and brand control.

Surprisingly, fruit-flavored e-cigarette shells have not only been stockpiled under the new rules, but also increased in price. According to several wechat business channels, the official price of the e-cigarette cartridge has risen from 99 yuan to 120-130 yuan. Even with tighter regulation, e-cigarettes remain a lucrative business for many speculators.

Data show that in 2021, there will be more than 1,500 e-cigarette manufacturers and brand enterprises in China, including 200 brand enterprises and 743 enterprises with annual sales of more than 20 million yuan. Most of these companies are located in Shenzhen, Dongguan and other places. Shenzhen's manhole alone has gathered 90% of the world's production capacity.

After huaqiangbei shanzhai machine factory into the baptism, the entry threshold of the e-cigarette industry has become extremely low. Some people in the industry said that the supply chain of e-cigarettes is becoming more and more mature. It only needs a factory, a little floor paint, two production lines, and some workers to assemble them. There is no testing link, let alone the production standard.

Young people are smoking fake e-cigarettes, and the health risks are unimaginable.

In the past, cases involving the sale of fake "Yue Ke" e-cigarettes have occurred many times across the country, involving amounts ranging from tens of thousands of yuan to nearly one million yuan.

It will be difficult for regulators to regulate e-cigarettes if small workshops that produce and sell counterfeit products sell them through wechat business, and it will be difficult for the public to report such cases, said Jiang Yuan, former director of the Tobacco Control Office of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. "The fact that online sales channels are dominated by e-cigarette users or minors is unrealistic to rely on them to burn Bridges."

Yunchuang High-tech hereby calls, "Please consumers correctly understand e-cigarettes to choose formal channels to buy, to create a healthy smoke-free environment for teenagers, and also please peers to supervise each other and make progress together, implement the national e-cigarette industry standard policies, standardize the industry as soon as possible, and welcome the new era of e-cigarettes!"