Recently, Chongqing Three Gorges College was exposed to have won a bid for a network firewall at a price of 850,000 RMB, while the same product was priced at only 299 RMB on an e-commerce platform, raising suspicions of unreasonable bidding. The procurement was subsequently halted, and the official response online has sparked discontent.
According to a recent post by a netizen, the bidding result announcement for the procurement of “TP-Link TL-R473G Export Firewall and DNS Equipment (CQS25A00331)” by Chongqing Three Gorges College on the China Government Procurement Network on May 9 revealed a winning bid price of 850,000 RMB per unit for the firewall. However, the same model product was priced at only 299 RMB on a certain e-commerce platform, leading to questions about the validity of the bidding price.
The supplier of the winning bid information was identified as “Fengdu County Hongzheng Trading Co., Ltd.” with a bid price of 850,000 RMB. Two other companies that participated in the bidding quoted prices of 887,000 RMB and 899,980 RMB respectively.
According to Jimo News, an industry insider specializing in network security work pointed out that based on the contents of the bid announcement, the item labeled as an “export firewall product” was actually an enterprise-level export router. Additionally, the TP-Link TL-R473G model product has a unit price of only a few hundred RMB, far below the price of 850,000 RMB per unit in the bid.
The official flagship store on JD.com shows that the TP-Link TL-R473G model product is priced at 299 RMB. Prices on other online shopping platforms for the same product are also in the range of a few hundred RMB.
It was reported that Fengdu County Hongzheng Trading Co., Ltd. was established in 2015 and initially operated in the field of agricultural planting, acquisition of agricultural by-products, primary processing, and sales before transitioning to sales of mechanical and electrical equipment, pipeline equipment, refrigeration equipment, computer software, electronic products, decoration design, and freight agency services after 2018.
Information from Qcc.com shows that Hongzheng Trading Co., Ltd. is registered at 5 Zu, Xindi Village, Fengdu County, Chongqing, with a registered capital of 5 million RMB, although the actual paid-up capital is shown as zero and the number of insured persons is zero. There is only one bidding record listed, which is the winning bid for Chongqing Three Gorges College in this case.
In response to this, the secretary of the village party branch stated that the company’s shareholders are villagers from the village, registered with their home address at the time, but they have not been residing in the village for a long time, and the registered company is not actually based in the village. “We are not clear about whether their company is actually in operation, or what they are doing.”
On the evening of May 10, the China Government Procurement Network issued an announcement stating that after verification, there were “illegal and irregular activities that affected the fairness of the procurement” in the winning project, leading to the decision to terminate the procurement.
On May 11, Chongqing Three Gorges College’s website also released a statement explaining the situation, revealing that upon verification and evidence collection, it was found that the product offered by the potential supplier was a regular gigabit Ethernet router that drastically deviated from the network firewall technical standards required by the college. As a result, the procurement was terminated, and they will “reopen the procurement process.”
The official responses have sparked discontent among netizens. “No one should be held accountable for this? Is this deceptive procurement for personal gain just going to end like this?””Using a product that is available for 299 RMB to bid for a product priced at 850,000 RMB, and actually winning the bid! Such a ridiculous occurrence that surpasses my imagination! — There is only one possibility, everyone involved from top to bottom received kickbacks!””Because all staff received kickbacks, of course, no one will take responsibility!””The prices for government procurement are always high, and when exposed, it’s just symbolic acknowledgment of the error without any punishment. Do you believe they will correct their ways? They claim three companies bidding, but in reality, it’s just one company bidding under three different names.””It’s laughable, treating netizens as fools, isn’t there supposed to be budgeting for the procurement items? Preliminary investigation? Audit? Once exposed, it’s canceled, and then it’s over?””What if the netizens hadn’t discovered or reported this until later?””Check the bidding history of Chongqing Three Gorges College for previous cases.”