The General Administration of Customs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has established a variety of coding schemes for factories and suppliers of export products and commodities. Lot codes and date codes are also required as well. The purpose of the codes is to track exports and collect the designated export duties.
The factory codes must appear on the export documents as well as the shipping cartons or commodity containers. Exports are inspected by customs officers at the export warehouses that reconcile the export documents to the actual shipments to ensure compliance.
Further inspections of export shipments at inland ports and seaports are conducted in an effort to deter cheating.
Only licensed export fireworks factories have valid factory codes. This is another way for the central government to ensure collection of the export duties, which is one of the most important sources of revenue to the PRC.
Factory codes are by province. Currently there are some 425 valid fireworks factory codes, down from a few thousand just 20 years ago. There are also factories without export factory codes, but they are not licensed to export, only produce fireworks for the domestic market.
The export fireworks factories are concentrated in three provinces, Hunan, Jiangxi and Guangxi. A factory code that begins with 49 is located in Hunan, which has about 310 export factories, mostly around Liuyang City. There are about 100 export factories in Jiangxi province with factory codes that begin with 40. Guangxi province has about 15 export factories and theirs begin with 72.
Labor shortages and mechanization of many of the processes that used to be done by hand, such as rolling paper tubes, pressing clay plugs into tubes, pasting shell casings, etc. are two primary reasons for many fireworks factories closing. Factories that were unable to make the investment in the new equipment, too far from the electrical grind or that were older or in disrepair were closed.
The central government of the PRC has made a concerted effort over the last decade or so to close the fireworks factories in the other provinces and concentrate fireworks production in these three provinces. Part of this was due to the many fatal explosions at fireworks factories in more densely populated provinces like Guangdong, and part of it was an effort to provide more employment opportunities in the rural provinces that had been more agricultural.
This move to concentrate fireworks manufacturing in these provinces also was to meet the logistic requirements of moving the fireworks from the factories in the inland provinces to the export ports services by ocean carriers that accept fireworks. This plan was negatively impacted when the fireworks warehouses at Foshan, Guangdong adjacent to a tributary to the Pearl River were destroyed in a massive fireworks fire on February 14, 2008.
I visited the facility 5 years earlier and learned this is where fireworks orders were consolidated from the factories from Jiangxi and Hunan provinces to the north for export via Hong Kong. This however, is another story in and of itself.
The factory codes are generally accurate, but unless one knows the factory code for each factory, it isn’t always helpful in discerning the original source. The Explosive Number (EX#) or Fireworks Certification Number (FC#) also can tell what factory the fireworks are supposed to be manufactured in and even what the devices is supposed to be, but that isn’t always accurate either.
Even if the paperwork with the shipment and the factory code and the EX# or FC# all match what is declared in the shipping carton or the label of the fireworks inside, it isn’t always a guarantee a particular shipment actually came from that particular factory. Or that the fireworks is what it is supposed to be.
This is more of an issue with fireworks that has been mislabeled and misclassified as Consumer Fireworks, FIREWORKS UN0336 1.4G, when in reality is it Display Fireworks and should be classified as FIREWORKS UN0335 1.3G.
This has been an issue for quite sometime and one of the primary reasons for the SE Fireworks tragedy at Enschede, The Netherlands on May, 2000.