Chinese customs officers confiscated another sizable batch of undeclared PC components at the border between Hong Kong and mainland China. A cache of 360 Intel CPUs, found hidden inside the body of a cross-border bus, were reportedly seized by a subsidiary of Gongbei Customs earlier this month.
According to the report, the customs staff routinely scanned the body of a bus but noticed something "abnormal" about it. Further inspection uncovered a bounty of hidden Intel CPUs. The photo taken of the stash is so close it's a little difficult to decipher exactly where the CPUs were hidden, but they appear to have been stashed in a partition and/or seat support between the driver and passenger sections.
On the evidence table, we can see what looks like a haul of Raptor Lake (or possibly Alder Lake) processors that were smuggled into the bus in newspaper wrapping. The source images aren't quite sharp enough to read the CPU markings, but the chip size, proportions, and engravings all look to be contemporary.
The CPUs are neatly laid out on a 6 x 15 grid on a table, presumably four CPUs deep to make a total of 360 CPUs. Assuming these are middle-of-the-road Core i5-13400 CPUs, the total USD value of the haul would be upwards of $72,000. At that valuation, the smugglers would have dodged about $10,000 in duties — had they been successful, of course. Unfortunately, their gamble was unsuccessful and so they're facing a pretty big loss, plus the ire of the Chinese courts.
As mentioned above, smugglers are mostly inspired by the VAT differential: goods bought inside the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) are zero-rated for tax. Meanwhile, on the mainland, the VAT for consumer goods is 13%. There's a big gray import market for tech in China, fed by these types of smuggling operations. The most popular gray imports are computer processors, SSDs, and GPUs — but buyers miss out on protections such as manufacturer warranties.
Hiding 360 Intel CPUs inside a bus isn't the biggest or most daring (stupid?) smuggling attempt we've seen fail in recent months. In late August we saw another bus-based smuggling attempt with 780 Intel processors hidden inside the engine of a cross-border bus. Similarly, modified cars, bikes, and scooters have been uncovered by keen-eyed customs officials. Some smugglers even attempt to make the move without a vehicle — stashing hundreds of CPUs or SSDs on their person and attempting to make it from Hong Kong or Macau to the mainland.
