The cross-border e-commerce industry is going through a big test.
The Aishide family paid 308 million yuan in back taxes, equivalent to 82% of the net profit for 2025, and the late payment fee alone was as high as 123 million yuan.
Hongchang Electronics paid a backpay of 40.419 million yuan, which directly exceeded the full-year profit in 2025.
In the first five days of June 2026, the centralized tax payment announcements of eight A-share listed companies made the entire industry nervous.
But this does not mean that the industry is declining, but that the cross-border e-commerce industry is experiencing a thorough “scraping of bones and healing the poison.”
To regard all tax subsidy cases as evidence of industry decline is to confuse diagnostic reports with the disease itself.
The numbers on this “test sheet” must be viewed in the context of regulatory changes.
Starting from October 2025, the fourth phase of the Golden Tax will be directly connected to the data of overseas platforms such as Amazon, and the tax authorities will obtain the seller’s full transaction details on a quarterly basis.
The historical practice of making cross-border repayments through private accounts and not declaring income has nowhere to hide under the penetrating supervision of the “five flows into one” in the fourth phase of the Golden Tax.
In the first half of 2026, the number of inspections filed for 9810 model cross-border e-commerce companies across the country increased by 83.7% year-on-year, and the number of inspection cases in the Yangtze River Delta region increased by 127% year-on-year.
The most critical detail is that none of the eight tax payment companies has been subject to administrative penalties, and the taxes and late payment fees have been paid in full.
The amount of repayment will be included in the current profit and loss in 2026 and will not involve retrospective adjustments to previous financial statements.
This is tantamount to saying that the tax bureau has given a “lenient confession” window, allowing companies to clear old historical accounts at once without affecting future operations.
The external factors facing the industry are regulatory upgrades, such as the implementation of the fourth phase of the Golden Tax, adjustments to the global small-value parcel tax exemption policy, and the implementation of new regulations on substantive review of customs declarations.
But what really determines the fate of the industry is internal factors.
The industry’s business model over the past decade has been too dependent on gray operations.
According to statistics, 82% of cross-border e-commerce companies that have been in business for more than 3 years have confusing old accounts, 69% of existing sellers have not reported their overseas income in a consolidated manner, and 53% have problems with the return of funds but unpaid taxes.
Private collection, paying for exports, underreporting and underreporting are almost universal unspoken rules in the industry.
This kind of “low-price competitiveness maintained by tax evasion” is itself an unsustainable disease.
This situation is not only illegal, but also leads to the typical “bad money drives out good money”.
Companies that operate in compliance with regulations cannot compete on price with companies that evade taxes, and the entire industry is locked in low-level competition.
After compliance, the cost increase of top sellers is only 15%-25%, that of medium-sized sellers is 30%-50%, and that of small and micro sellers is more than 100%.
Once the “price advantage” brought about by tax evasion is wiped out, the industry can truly return to competition on product power and brand power.
From the perspective of the industry as a whole, this is a phased adjustment, but the differentiation is extremely severe.
The national cross-border e-commerce import and export volume will reach 2.75 trillion yuan in 2025, with an average annual growth of 11.2% from 2021 to 2025, and the growth rate is 4.1 percentage points higher than the overall import and export in the same period.
Leading brand sellers such as Anker Innovation will see their revenue increase from 17.5 billion to 30.5 billion yuan from 2023 to 2025, with a three-year compound growth rate of 32%.
This industry is still growing at a rapid pace and there is no overall shrinkage.
Wang Zhihua, Director of the Department of Foreign Trade of the Ministry of Commerce, made it clear that the current regulatory direction is to promote the industry from scale expansion to high-quality development, and to help upgrade “Made in China” to “Chinese Brand”.
Sellers who used to rely on tax evasion and low-price distribution are having their living space reduced to zero.
However, those sellers who complete the compliance layout in advance and take the branding route can obtain traditional advantageous resources such as bank credit and IPO financing by virtue of their compliance qualifications, and achieve positive upgrades.
The wave of tax payments is not an obituary for the cross-border e-commerce industry, but a diagnosis on the operating table.
Those who shout that “the industry is about to cool down” are like saying that the patient is dying when they see him bleeding in the operating room, but they don’t see the doctor removing the lesions in his body.
After this round of adjustments, the surviving cross-border e-commerce companies will no longer be “distribution machines” supported by information gaps and tax evasion, but “Chinese brands” with real brand power, product power and global competitiveness.
The industry will not decline, but it is time for those shady operations to exit.
