Offices of Oppo And Other Chinese Manufacturers Across The Country Face I-T Raids

The Income tax (I-T) department is conducting raids across the offices of Chinese phone manufacturers Oppo and Xiaomi and their distribution partners and some contract manufacturing companies across the country according to various media reports.

An I-T raid has been going on since yesterday at Oppo headquarters in Perungudi in Chennai as well as other offices. Eight officers are under investigation in Chennai as well as in other big cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Tamil Nadu, as reported by News18 Tamil. 

When contacted by Inc42, a representative of Oppo shared a brief response—”As an invested partner in India, we highly respect and abide by the law of the land. We will continue to fully cooperate with authorities concerned as per procedure.” The company neither confirmed nor denied about the same. It didn’t share the extent of the damage (If any, though) being happened in their premises, either. 

According to ET, the search is being conducted at 15 premises in Delhi NCR and Karnataka for Oppo, OnePlus and Xiaomi. The search operations are being reportedly conducted based on intelligence input on concealed income and tax evasion. 

The I-T department had conducted similar raids on Chinese telecom manufacturing company ZTE in August this year. Raids were conducted at five premises, including the corporate office, residence of the foreign director, residence of the company secretary, accounts manager and cash handler of the foreign subsidiary company in India. 

According to the I-T department, those raids revealed that ZTE was making massive profits by trading telecom equipment but had been booking losses on its records, evading paying hundreds of crores of rupees in taxes. The ZTE investigation revealed that the losses were being booked by the company through bogus expenses it had supposedly incurred.

Those entities that ‘charged’ ZTE were found to be non-existent at their addresses according to media reports. 

According to Sun News, more than 30 locations were raided in Tamil Nadu, with ten of them being in Chennai. Contract manufacturer Foxconn’s Kanchipuram facility is reportedly one of the facilities raided. 

Chinese-manufacture Xiaomi commands a lion’s share of Indian smartphone sales with the company accounting for 23.4% of all smartphone sales in the country during Q3 2021, followed by South Korean Samsung (16.9%), Vivo (16.4%), realme (15.7%) and Oppo (10.7%). The last three are owned and operated by Chinese conglomerate BBK electronics, giving it an effective 42.8% market share.