SEOUL, May 13 (Reuters) - South Korea's government

signed an agreement on Monday with the local units of Alibaba's ( BABA )

AliExpress and PDD Holdings' Temu to promote

product safety, the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said.

The agreement comes after heightened regulatory scrutiny of

AliExpress, Temu and other Chinese e-commerce platforms as they

significantly expand their user base in South Korea.

"Recently conducted safety inspections on products such as

those for children sold on the AliExpress and Temu platforms

detected a large amount of substances harmful to the human body,

seriously threatening consumer safety" and making the agreement

necessary, trade watchdog KFTC said.

Ray Zhang, CEO of AliExpress Korea, and Qin Sun, co-founder

of Temu, were present at the signing ceremony on Monday.

Under the agreement, KFTC will collect data on harmful

products and provide them to AliExpress and Temu, which will

inform sellers and consumers. The government will also check

whether harmful products have been blocked from sale by the

platforms.

It is the first time Temu has signed such a voluntary

agreement anywhere in the world, the KFTC said, although other

areas such as the European Union and Australia have histories of

regulating dangerous products sold on online platforms through

such agreements.

South Korea's e-commerce market punches far above its weight

as the fourth-largest in the world according to Euromonitor

data, only behind China, the United States and the United

Kingdom and bigger than Japan's market, despite having only the

29th largest population in the world.

The number of AliExpress and Temu users in South Korea has

ballooned to 8.87 million and 8.29 million, respectively, as of

March 2024, ahead of domestic shopping platforms such as 11st's

7.4 million users, according to the KFTC.

The growth rate is especially fast for Temu, which entered

the South Korean market in July last year.

South Korean e-commerce purchases from overseas have jumped

to 6.8 trillion won ($4.97 billion) in 2023 from 5.3 trillion

won in 2022, according to Statistics Korea.

($1 = 1,368.5200 won)