A factory in Houjie, Dongguan, that makes charging cases for Bluetooth earbuds took an OEM order from a German customer last year: goods worth CNY 860,000, declared for export through Yantian. The day before loading, the sales manager went through the whole email thread and found only one message from the brand owner saying "you can use our logo" — no stamped authorisation letter. The broker told him to ship anyway, arguing that inspection rates were low. At the port, customs officers found a European registered trademark printed on the outer cartons and detained all 1,200 units on the spot. While the factory submitted paperwork to customs, it also drafted an apology to the German buyer. Delivery slipped by 21 days, and the company eventually paid CNY 270,000 in contractual penalties. Wang Zhenhua, the owner, said afterwards that he had always assumed the trademark belonged to the customer, the goods belonged to the customer, and his only job was to make them and send them out. It had never occurred to him that the phrase "customs protection of intellectual property rights" had anything to do with his business.
His story is not unusual in the workshops of the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas. Every year, a large share of the infringing export cases customs seizes are not deliberate counterfeiting but broken or missing authorisation chains. The sections below walk through recordation, the two detention routes, the traps exporters fall into, and a checklist you can act on directly.
What Customs IPR Recordation Actually Is
The legal basis is the Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Customs Protection of Intellectual Property Rights, State Council Decree No. 395 of 2003, which took effect on 1 March 2004 and was amended in 2010. Article 2 sets the scope: trademark rights, copyright and neighbouring rights, and patent rights that are connected to imported or exported goods and protected under Chinese law and administrative regulations. Note what falls outside that scope — trade secrets are not covered, nor are unregistered rights other than design patents.
Recordation, in essence, means filing the rights holder's identity, trademark registration numbers, list of authorised users and known infringement leads into the General Administration of Customs database in advance, so that ports across the country have something to compare against during inspection. Article 7 makes recordation voluntary rather than mandatory, and it carries no fee. For companies in the export chain, though, the practical gap between having it and not having it is wide:
- For a recorded trademark, when customs spots suspect goods during routine inspection it notifies the rights holder in writing and moves into ex officio detention.
- For an unrecorded trademark, customs has nothing to compare against, will rarely intervene on its own, and the rights holder must discover the lead and then file an application.
In plain terms, recordation is paying customs to watch on your behalf. Rights holders normally list their authorised OEM factories and exporters as well. When a company on that list declares goods bearing the same trademark, customs releases them directly instead of notifying the holder shipment by shipment. This matters enormously to OEM plants: on the list means smooth clearance; off the list means every single shipment can be treated as suspect.
There is a further benefit that is easy to overlook: recordation data is publicly searchable on the customs website. For buyers, a supplier willing to spend the time and effort on recordation usually signals a clean authorisation chain. For exporters, the same database is a tool — you can check whether the trademark your customer quotes is actually recorded, who owns it, and whether your factory appears as an authorised user.
Who Files, What Is Required, and the Ten-Year Term
The applicant is the rights holder, and this includes overseas companies and individuals. An overseas holder may appoint a domestic agency or a domestic natural person, and must issue a power of attorney. In practice, most overseas holders engage an agency familiar with customs formalities and file everything in one pass, rather than responding to one correction request after another.
Article 8 lists the mandatory contents of the application. Four items matter most in practice:
- The holder's name, place of registration or nationality, domicile and mailing address.
- The name and content of the intellectual property right and related information, such as the trademark registration number and the classes of goods it covers.
- How the right is licensed — which companies are authorised, and within what scope.
- Known information about infringing goods: manufacturers, importers and exporters, the port of entry or exit, distinguishing features and prices.
Article 10 provides that recordation takes effect on the date the General Administration of Customs approves it and runs for ten years. If protection is still needed when the term ends, renewal must be handled within the six months before expiry, and each renewal lasts another ten years. In reality, a great many recordations lapse for a very ordinary reason: the rights holder changes legal counsel and nobody watches the deadline during the handover. Once recordation expires, customs' ex officio protection stops with it, and it stops silently — no notice arrives to remind you.
Two paperwork details are easy to miss. If the trademark registration certificate expires during the recordation term, the renewal certificate must be filed promptly. If the trademark is assigned or its registration particulars change, the change must be filed with the General Administration of Customs within 30 working days of the change. Miss either one and customs will treat the holder's information as inconsistent at the point of inspection, breaking the continuity of protection.
General Security: Two Options and the Amount
On-application detention requires security. Posting it shipment by shipment is impractical for a rights holder that defends its marks often. The implementing rules of the Regulations allow a general security, which settles the question for multiple applications at once.
There are two forms to choose from:
- A cash deposit, paid into a designated customs account and drawn down shipment by shipment as goods are detained.
- A bank guarantee, an irrevocable letter of guarantee issued by a bank and accepted by customs, so no funds are tied up.
How is the amount set? Customs may assess it from the value of the goods involved in the holder's detention applications over the previous year. Where there is no such record, the general security is CNY 200,000. A bank guarantee is usually the cheaper route — the issuance fee is far below the opportunity cost of locking up CNY 200,000, so smaller rights holders should look at it first. One clarification: the general security covers the on-application route. Ex officio detention is initiated by customs, so the rights holder does not post security shipment by shipment at all.
Ex Officio Detention versus On-Application Detention
This is the pair of concepts exporters confuse most, and the two routes differ completely in who triggers them, what conditions apply and what deadlines run.
Ex officio detention is triggered by customs. When customs spots goods that appear to infringe a recorded IP right during supervision, it notifies the rights holder in writing immediately. If the holder files an application and provides security as required within three working days of delivery of that notice, customs detains the goods; if no application arrives in time, the goods are released. The gate on this route is the word "recorded" — an unrecorded right cannot use it.
On-application detention is triggered by the rights holder. The holder discovers a lead, applies to the customs office at the port of entry or exit, and provides security not exceeding the value of the goods. This route is open to unrecorded rights as well, and the security is calculated per shipment: one detention, one deposit.
On timing: once goods suspected of infringing a trademark or copyright are detained, customs investigates and issues a determination, and confiscates the goods if infringement is confirmed. For goods suspected of patent infringement, customs does not judge whether infringement exists at all — it detains and notifies, and if no court assistance notice arrives within 30 working days of detention, the goods are released and the parties take the dispute to litigation. Three dates are worth remembering: three working days for the rights holder to respond to a notice, 30 working days for patent cases, and the overall tempo of the customs investigation itself.
Who pays depends on the outcome. Where customs detains goods ex officio and its investigation confirms infringement, storage, custody and disposal costs are borne by the infringer. Where no infringement is found, those costs fall on the applicant. That is exactly why security is required on the on-application route: the deposit protects customs, and it also backstops compensation to the other party — the applicant may end up paying for warehouse space it never wanted.
The Four Traps Exporters Fall Into Most Often
Read through a few years of customs administrative penalty decisions and export-side infringement clusters into four scenarios.
- An OEM plant cannot produce a brand owner's authorisation. The customer placed a private-label order, and all the factory holds is email, chat logs and an unstamped purchase order. What customs wants is a document issued by the rights holder, or the factory named on the authorised-user list in the recordation file. Missing both, the shipment is treated as suspected infringement.
- A private-label shipment is caught on the way out. The order came from the customer, and the hangtags, packaging and nameplates all carry the customer's registered trademark. The moment it is declared, the system flags the match. Some factories do not even know that their overseas customer is not the trademark owner but a downstream distributor — the customer cannot produce an authorisation either.
- Samples, gifts and repair parts are covered too. Many companies assume a few hundred sample units or small accessories shipped alongside an order are not "imported or exported goods" and can travel by express or be tucked into a container. The Regulations define scope by connection to imported and exported goods, not by quantity or purpose, so samples are detained all the same.
- A freight forwarder uses someone else's branded packaging without asking. To speed up consolidation, forwarders group different customers' cargo, share cartons, or let a consolidator print the previous shipment's brand on the box — and the whole container is stopped. This is the most unjust of the four traps, and the loss is calculated on the entire container.
What Infringement Costs: Confiscation, Fines and the Criminal Threshold
Article 91 of the Customs Law is blunt: goods that infringe intellectual property rights protected by Chinese law and administrative regulations are confiscated, and a fine of up to 30 percent of the value of the goods is imposed; where a crime is constituted, criminal liability follows. On the CNY 860,000 of goods in our opening case, the administrative fine could reach roughly CNY 260,000 — and the cargo is confiscated in full, with no option to return it or clear it by paying duty.
Where the conduct is deemed deliberate counterfeiting, penalties escalate. Article 60 of the Trademark Law allows a fine of up to five times the illegal turnover where that turnover exceeds CNY 50,000. On the criminal side, Article 213 of the Criminal Law covers counterfeiting a registered trademark: for serious circumstances, up to three years of imprisonment together with a fine or a fine alone; for especially serious circumstances, three to ten years with a fine. Under the 2020 judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate on criminal cases involving intellectual property, illegal turnover of CNY 50,000 or illegal gains of CNY 30,000 already meets the "serious" threshold, while turnover of CNY 250,000 or gains of CNY 150,000 moves into "especially serious". An OEM plant simply producing to a customer's order can cross that line when the numbers get large enough.
Beyond money, there is credit. The Measures for Customs Credit Management of Enterprises grade companies into advanced certified, generally certified, general credit and discredited. An administrative penalty for infringement pulls the rating down directly. Once the rating drops, inspection rates rise, clearance slows and the benefits of AEO mutual recognition shrink — a daily time cost paid for one old mistake. For companies in fast-moving consumer goods or seasonal products, three extra days at the border can hurt more than the fine.
A Four-Step Self-Protection Checklist Before You Export
None of these steps is complicated. The hard part is doing them consistently — and doing them before you accept the order, not at the inspection bay.
- Check the recordation database before you accept the order. Both the General Administration of Customs website and the China customs IP protection system allow searches. Confirming that your customer's trademark is recorded is only half the job; you also need to see whether your own factory appears on the authorised-user list. If it does not, ask the customer to file the addition.
- Get a stamped written authorisation. Email and chat logs carry limited weight in a customs determination. Ask the customer for a letter with a company seal or signature stating the trademark name, registration number, authorised products, quantities, destination countries and territories, and validity period.
- Write the responsibility into the contract. An OEM contract should state that the customer warrants its trademarks, designs and packaging do not infringe third-party rights, that the customer bears the cost of any detention, fine or storage fee caused by a defective right, and how compensation is calculated and evidenced.
- Keep the whole authorisation chain on file. Order, proforma invoice, authorisation letter, copy of the registration certificate and correspondence should be archived shipment by shipment, and retained for several years after the contract is performed. When an investigation starts, companies that can produce a complete chain within 48 hours are handled on an entirely different timeline.
Cross-Border E-Commerce: Platform Brand Registry Is Not Customs Recordation
Sellers on Amazon, eBay or their own storefronts routinely treat two different things as one. Platform brand registry handles complaints, hijackers and listing privileges inside the marketplace, and the reviewing body is the platform. Customs IPR recordation covers the physical movement of goods across the border, and the competent authority is the General Administration of Customs. Neither recognises the other, and the databases do not talk to each other.
A seller who has done only the platform filing, then stocks overseas warehouses and ships FBA consignments, gets no help at all from that badge in the backend if customs flags an infringement match. The right approach is to run both tracks in parallel: platform registry for the online channel, customs recordation for the physical channel. A brand recorded with customs also lets you block copycats proactively — an offensive use that most sellers overlook, and it matters most in original-design categories where imitation is easy.
A Closing Word for Trading and OEM Companies
Back to Wang Zhenhua. The first thing he did afterwards was have his legal team check the recordation status of every customer's trademark they handled, turn the authorisation letter into a standard contract annex, and require a sales manager's signature before any customs declaration. The next shipment also went through Yantian, and inspection was over in ten minutes.
Customs IPR recordation is not a tool reserved for large corporations. It moves the question "can I prove this shipment is authorised?" out of the inspection bay and into a fixed step at order intake. The CNY 270,000 in penalties it saves is usually more than a full year of customs brokerage fees.
Frequently Asked Questions
If customs detains my export shipment, can I get it released simply by supplying the authorisation letter late?
No. Once goods enter an infringement investigation, release depends on the customs determination, and the authorisation letter is only the base document proving where the right came from. If goods are found to infringe a trademark or copyright, they are confiscated and a late filing buys nothing. Submitting the document early is what improves the odds of a no-infringement finding.
My brand owner has already completed brand registry on an e-commerce platform. Do we still need customs recordation?
Yes, these are two independent tracks. Platform brand registry is reviewed by the marketplace and only settles complaints, hijackers and listing privileges inside that platform. Customs IPR recordation is administered by the General Administration of Customs and governs the physical movement of goods across the border. The databases do not communicate, so platform registry alone never triggers ex officio detention by customs.
Does a general security always mean depositing CNY 200,000 in cash?
No. The general security can take the form of a cash deposit or a bank guarantee. Customs may assess the amount from the value of goods involved in the holder's detention applications over the previous year; where there is no such record, the amount is CNY 200,000. With a bank guarantee the funds are not actually tied up, and you only bear the issuance fee.
We are an OEM factory producing strictly to a customer's order. Why would we still be held liable?
Because customs judges the trademark status of the goods themselves, not who placed the order. As the exporter or declarant, the factory is obliged to submit proof of lawful authorisation. Without a complete authorisation chain it is treated as suspected infringement, facing confiscation, a fine of up to 30 percent of the goods' value, and at higher amounts exposure to the counterfeiting offence under Article 213 of the Criminal Law.