Vietnam gives clean chit to baby products importer

After examining 75 items sold by the chain, the Ministry of Industry and Trade said Con Cung has been able to provide legal import documents for all of them.

However, the firm did not correctly follow regulations on labeling the products. It also made other mistakes in discounting and selling goods on its website, the ministry said in a statement

The ministry has asked Con Cung to correct its mistakes and submit a report on actions taken. 

Con Cung had come under the scanner after a customer complained it had sold him a shirt with a label that said “Made in Thailand,” but looked like it had been swapped with another label.

The company has asserted that it does not import counterfeit products and has documents to prove it.

“Most of Con Cung’s mistakes were made by inexperienced employees,” the firm’s CEO Nguyen Quoc Minh told VnExpress on Friday. "The country’s regulations keep changing so the firm wasn’t able to catch up with them." 

Con Cung has taken the wrongly labeled shirts off the shelves so that customers won’t be confused. The firm is also working to improve its item management so that the same thing would not happen again, Minh added.

Con Cung, which has received funding from the Vietnamese-Japanese DAIWA-SSIAM Vietnam Growth Fund, has 318 stores nationwide - 288 Con Cung and 30 ToyCity stores. 

Its pre-tax profit in 2016 was VND8 billion ($350,000) on revenues of VND524 billion ($22.9 million), according to the Vietnam Industry Research and Consultancy.