Temu’s British operating company reported revenue of roughly USD 171m for 2025, a jump of about 171% on the prior year, according to accounts filed at Companies House and first reported by the Financial Times. The filing lands at an awkward moment for the Chinese-owned marketplace: the United Kingdom is now the last large consumer market in the West where parcels worth under GBP 135 still cross the border free of customs duty, and the government has already set a date to end that.
The combination is the story. Temu’s UK growth curve steepened in the same year that the European Union switched its own duty-free window off, and the UK relief that still underpins the economics of single-item, China-direct parcels is scheduled to disappear by October 2028. Retail Gazette, reporting the filing on 5 October 2026, framed it the same way: revenue up 171%, with an import duty crackdown looming.
In short
- Whaleco UK Limited, the UK operating entity behind Temu, filed full accounts for the year ended 31 December 2025 at Companies House on 30 September 2026.
- Revenue of about USD 171m, up roughly 171% from USD 63.2m (about GBP 46.3m) in 2024, per the filing as reported by the Financial Times and Retail Gazette.
- The UK’s GBP 135 low value import (LVI) relief is scheduled for removal by October 2028, pulled forward six months from March 2029 on 23 June 2026.
- The EU already closed its window: the EUR 150 de minimis duty relief ended on 1 July 2026, and Shein reported a 13.9% fall in European revenue in the quarter that followed.
- Most of the sales do not sit in the UK company: campaigners allege the bulk of British consumer spend is booked through an Irish entity, which makes the UK filing a partial view of the business.
What Temu’s UK accounts actually show
Whaleco UK Limited, company number 14476358, is registered at 5 Churchill Place in London’s Canary Wharf. Its full accounts for the financial year ended 31 December 2025 were filed on 30 September 2026, four days before the Financial Times reported the headline revenue figure.
The reported trajectory is steep by any measure. Revenue of roughly USD 171m against USD 63.2m the year before works out to growth of about 171%, which is why two separate headlines carried the same number in different units. The arithmetic is consistent: 171% growth on a USD 63.2m base produces almost exactly USD 171m.
For context on the prior year, Whaleco UK reported USD 63.2m of revenue (about GBP 46.3m) for 2024 and pre-tax profit of USD 3.9m, up from USD 2m in 2023, according to coverage of the September 2025 filing in City AM and Retail Gazette. Applying the exchange rate implied by that pair, roughly USD 1.365 to the pound, the 2025 revenue figure converts to about GBP 125m.
One caution matters here. A Companies House name match is not the same thing as the trading entity, and in Temu’s case the distinction is the entire point. The register also carries a UK establishment of Whaleco Technology Limited, the Irish company, under registration FC042963. Readers who want to check the filing history themselves can do so on the Companies House record for Whaleco UK Limited.
What the UK company does and does not do
The UK company is best understood as a service and support vehicle rather than the merchant of record for British orders. That structure is why its revenue line, however fast-growing, has never resembled Temu’s actual British gross merchandise value.
The Fair Tax Foundation made that case publicly in September 2025, alleging that more than USD 750m (about GBP 553m) of UK sales had been routed through Whaleco Technology Limited in Ireland in the prior year, then onward through Singapore and ultimately to the Cayman Islands. Retail Week reported at the time that Temu’s UK arm was accused of paying negligible corporation tax in Britain despite what the campaigners called enormous sales.
Temu has not been found to have broken any tax law, and the structure described is a common one for platform businesses selling into Europe. The relevant point for a trade story is narrower: the UK filing is a window onto a slice of the operation, not the whole of it.
Why the growth rate is the signal, not the absolute number
A UK service entity tripling its revenue in a year implies a sharply larger volume of underlying British activity, because the fees it books scale with the work it does. The acceleration is the measurable thing. It arrives precisely as the duty regime that makes China-direct, single-item parcels cheap begins to close across every comparable market except Britain.
Why the UK is now the last big duty-free window
Three of the four largest Western consumer markets have already acted on low-value imports. The United States suspended its USD 800 de minimis exemption on 29 August 2025, so every import now attracts duty, with postal shipments required to prepay. The threshold for prepayment obligations on postal traffic was raised to USD 2,500 as of 24 July 2026.
The European Union removed its EUR 150 customs duty relief on 1 July 2026 and layered a flat per-parcel handling charge on top. Japan is moving in the same direction: its ruling party’s taxation council has proposed abolishing the JPY 10,000 exemption so that all imported goods attract the standard 10% consumption tax regardless of declared value, and reporting on 5 October 2026 indicated Tokyo is now weighing stronger border controls on the same traffic.
Britain is the outlier. Goods valued at GBP 135 or less still enter free of customs duty. Our earlier reporting on the EU customs reform that entered into force this autumn set out how quickly that European window shut once the legislative machinery was in place, and the UK is now travelling the same road on a slower timetable.
The arbitrage is geographic, not just fiscal
When one major market keeps a relief that its neighbours have dropped, volume reroutes. That is a matter of routine logistics planning rather than anything exotic: consolidators and platform sellers optimise for landed cost, and landed cost is where duty lives.
Ecommerce News Europe reported on 2 October 2026 that more than 90% of cross-border consumer purchases in Europe are now made on Temu, Shein or AliExpress, which gives a sense of how concentrated the affected flow is. A single relief in a single market is therefore a meaningful variable for three platforms, not a marginal technicality.
How the UK plans to close the GBP 135 relief
The policy direction has been set for more than a year, and the only moving part has been the date. On 23 June 2026 the government pulled the removal of LVI relief forward by six months, from March 2029 to a target of October 2028. HM Revenue and Customs published a policy paper on 13 July 2026, titled “Reforming the customs treatment of low value imports into the United Kingdom”, that provides the framework for new customs arrangements covering low-value goods.
Once the relief goes, goods valued below GBP 135 become liable for customs duty on import. The reform carries a defined set of exclusions, which matter commercially because they determine which flows are untouched.
| Element | Current position | Position after removal |
|---|---|---|
| Customs duty on goods under GBP 135 | Relieved | Payable |
| Target date | Relief in force | By October 2028 (brought forward from March 2029) |
| Consumer-to-consumer parcels at GBP 39 or less | Relieved | Excluded from the change |
| Excise goods | Already outside LVI relief | Excluded from the change |
| Goods under import restrictions or trade defence measures | Already outside LVI relief | Excluded from the change |
| GB to Northern Ireland movements under the Windsor Framework | Separate regime | Excluded from the change |
| VAT point of collection | Point of sale for most low-value imports | Under review, no decision announced |
The VAT question is still open
HMRC has signalled that it is assessing whether VAT collection on low-value imports should shift away from the point of sale to align with the new customs process. The department has acknowledged mixed views on the options it put forward, and no decision has been published.
That matters more than it sounds. For platforms, the administrative burden of a duty change is largely a classification and declaration problem. A VAT collection change is a cash-flow and systems problem that touches every order, and the two landing together would compound the cost.
Two years is a short runway for classification work
Duty liability depends on commodity codes, origin and valuation. Applying duty to tens of millions of individual sub-GBP 135 consignments requires product-level tariff classification at a granularity that direct-from-factory marketplaces have not historically needed for the UK.
Platforms that already rebuilt this capability for the EU and US changes have a head start. Those that leaned on the UK relief as the last clean market have roughly two years to build what their competitors finished in 2025 and 2026.
What happened when the EU closed its own window
The EU provides the only live test of what removing the relief does to volume and revenue, and the early read is blunt. Our reporting on the first full quarter after the change found that the EUR 3 per-parcel duty roughly halved China-origin parcel flow into Belgium and cut it 46% in the Netherlands.
The financial transmission showed up quickly on the platform side. Shein’s first post-IPO quarter showed European revenue down 13.9%, which the company attributed to the removal of the EUR 150 exemption and the flat per-item charge that replaced it.
Two caveats apply before reading that across to Britain. The EU change bundled a duty liability with a fixed handling fee, and a fixed fee hits low-ticket orders disproportionately. The UK reform as drafted removes a duty relief, which is a percentage effect rather than a flat one, so the shape of the impact should differ even if the direction does not.
Flat fees and ad valorem duty are not the same instrument
A flat EUR 3 charge on a EUR 8 order is a 37.5% cost increase. The same charge on an EUR 80 order is under 4%. That asymmetry is what drove the sharp drop in the cheapest parcel categories in European data.
An ad valorem duty scales with the order, so it compresses margin more evenly across the basket. Platforms facing the UK change can therefore defend the very low end in a way they could not in the EU, which argues against a simple read-across of the 13.9% European revenue effect.
How the four big markets now compare
Set side by side, the regimes are converging on the same answer by different routes and on different clocks.
| Market | Former threshold | Status | Effective date | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | USD 800 de minimis | Suspended | 29 August 2025 | All imports attract duty; postal prepayment required |
| European Union | EUR 150 duty relief | Removed | 1 July 2026 | Duty liability plus flat per-parcel handling charge |
| United Kingdom | GBP 135 LVI relief | Scheduled for removal | By October 2028 | Duty becomes payable; VAT collection point under review |
| Japan | JPY 10,000 exemption | Proposed abolition | Under the 2026 reform programme | 10% consumption tax on all imports regardless of value |
The practical consequence is a two-year window in which Britain is structurally cheaper to serve from China than the EU or the US on sub-GBP 135 orders. Temu’s 171% UK revenue growth is the first hard datapoint suggesting that window is being used.
Why the US comparison is the harshest one
The American suspension was the most abrupt of the three, and it was followed by an operational tightening rather than a settling-in period. Our coverage of the moment CBP ends its mail entry grace period on 22 October set out how quickly the postal channel moved from informal to formal entry requirements once the policy was in place.
That sequence is the one UK platform operators should plan against. The duty change is the announced event; the enforcement and declaration tightening that follows it is where the operating cost actually lands.
Where the revenue actually sits
Temu’s European corporate structure has been reported on repeatedly, and it is directly relevant to how the UK accounts should be read. The Guardian reported in October 2025 that Temu’s EU operation had more than doubled profits to nearly USD 120m while employing only eight staff. The Irish Times had earlier reported that around EUR 720m of revenue ran through the group’s Irish subsidiary.
Against that backdrop, a UK entity booking USD 171m of revenue is a service fee line, not a sales line. The distinction is worth stating plainly because a 171% growth headline invites the wrong inference about British market share.
| Metric | FY2023 | FY2024 | FY2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue (USD) | Not detailed in reporting reviewed | 63.2m | About 171m |
| Revenue (GBP equivalent) | Not detailed in reporting reviewed | About 46.3m | About 125m at the implied rate |
| Pre-tax profit (USD) | 2m | 3.9m | Not detailed in reporting reviewed |
| Year-on-year revenue growth | Not stated | Roughly doubled | About 171% |
| Accounts filed at Companies House | March 2025 | 16 September 2025 | 30 September 2026 |
What is not yet public
The 2025 pre-tax profit, tax charge and headcount for Whaleco UK Limited were not set out in the reporting that could be verified for this piece. The accounts themselves are on the register as a scanned document, which is why the published coverage has concentrated on the revenue line.
Anyone modelling the tax exposure should therefore treat the profit line as unknown rather than extrapolating from the 2024 margin. A service entity’s margin can move sharply with intra-group fee arrangements.
What the October 28 Budget could change
The next scheduled opportunity to move the timetable again is close. The Autumn Budget is set for 28 October 2026, a date confirmed at the end of July. The June 2026 decision to pull the LVI removal forward by six months establishes that the government is willing to accelerate, which makes the Budget a live risk for any plan built around an October 2028 horizon.
British retailers have pressed for faster action throughout, and Sky News reported in June 2026 that the six-month acceleration still left retail trade bodies dissatisfied. The political economy points one way: the longer Britain holds a relief its trading partners have abandoned, the louder the domestic complaint about an uneven playing field.
The broader UK posture on Chinese imports is hardening
Low-value parcels are not the only front. Reports on 4 and 5 October 2026 indicated that London is preparing its first tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, with a 45% figure under consideration, after Chinese brands took close to a quarter of UK new car sales in September. Our piece on the UK weighing a 45% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles set out how closely that follows the European Commission’s lead.
A government moving on Chinese EVs is not obviously a government inclined to defend a parcel relief that overwhelmingly benefits Chinese platforms. The two files are separate in law and adjacent in politics.
What this means for UK sellers and marketplaces
For domestic retailers, the duty change is a competitive equaliser arriving two years late relative to the EU. For cross-border platform sellers, it is a cost event with a known outer date and an uncertain inner one.
The practical planning task splits into three parts. First, tariff classification coverage across the sub-GBP 135 catalogue, since duty cannot be calculated without commodity codes and origin. Second, a landed-cost model that can absorb a duty line without repricing the entire catalogue. Third, a declaration pathway, because the volume of consignments involved makes manual entry impractical.
Pricing is the decision that cannot be deferred
Platforms in the EU largely chose to pass the new cost through rather than absorb it, and parcel volumes fell accordingly. Those that absorbed it protected volume at the expense of unit economics on exactly the orders where there was least margin to give.
Neither answer is obviously right. What the European data does establish is that the lowest-ticket segment is the most elastic, so the catalogue mix after the change is unlikely to look like the catalogue mix before it.
The compliance cost falls unevenly
Large platforms can amortise a customs technology build across millions of orders. Smaller UK importers and drop-shippers carry the same per-consignment obligations without that scale.
That asymmetry has been visible in every de minimis removal so far. The headline targets are the large Chinese marketplaces; a predictable share of the operational pain lands on small domestic importers who were using the same relief.
Why undervaluation becomes the next enforcement front
Removing a duty relief creates an incentive that did not previously exist. While goods under GBP 135 enter duty free, the declared value of a low-cost parcel has limited fiscal consequence for customs duty purposes. Once duty attaches, every declared value becomes a revenue question.
That is the pattern seen in both markets that moved first. Enforcement attention shifted from whether a parcel qualified for relief to whether its stated value, commodity code and country of origin were accurate. The US experience is instructive: the suspension of de minimis was followed by a tightening of declaration requirements through the postal channel rather than a period of quiet bedding-in.
Valuation, classification and origin are three separate exposures
Valuation disputes turn on whether the price paid reflects the transaction value, including elements such as shipping and any seller-side discounting arrangements. Classification disputes turn on the commodity code applied, which determines the duty rate.
Origin is the third and often the hardest. A parcel dispatched from a Chinese fulfilment centre is not necessarily of Chinese origin for duty purposes, and the inverse also holds. Platforms that rely on seller-supplied origin declarations inherit the accuracy of thousands of individual sellers.
Who carries the liability is a contractual question
Marketplaces and the sellers on them have spent the past two years renegotiating where customs liability sits. The answer varies by platform model: a merchant of record carries more exposure than a pure intermediary, and the UK reform will force a fresh look at those terms before October 2028.
For sellers, the practical step is to confirm in writing who is the importer of record on a UK order after the change, and who absorbs a post-clearance duty demand. That question has a clean answer today only because the duty is currently zero.
Platform scrutiny in Europe is already widening beyond customs
Customs is one of several open files. Temu announced on 5 October 2026 that it had partnered with Italy’s ICQRF, the agriculture ministry’s fraud repression inspectorate, to strengthen the protection of geographical indications on its marketplace, a sign of how much compliance work the platform is now doing in Europe at the same time.
Enforcement capacity is finite, and regulators tend to sequence rather than parallelise. A duty regime that begins collecting on tens of millions of consignments is likely to absorb attention that currently goes elsewhere, which cuts both ways for platforms planning their 2028 compliance spend.
What to watch next
Four markers will show whether the UK timetable holds or tightens. The Autumn Budget on 28 October 2026 is the first and nearest. The second is the outcome of HMRC’s VAT collection review, which determines whether the 2028 change is one adjustment or two.
The third is the next set of Whaleco UK accounts, due in 2027, which will show whether the 171% growth rate was a step change or a single year’s catch-up. The fourth is parcel volume data into UK ports and airports, which is where any pre-emptive rerouting away from the EU would appear first.
The strategic question underneath all four is simple. Britain has roughly two years of relative advantage as a destination for low-value China-direct parcels, and the first company filing to cover that period shows revenue up 171%. Whether the window closes on schedule or early is now substantially a political decision rather than a technical one.
Frequently asked questions
How much revenue did Temu’s UK company report for 2025?
Whaleco UK Limited reported revenue of roughly USD 171m for the year ended 31 December 2025, according to accounts filed at Companies House on 30 September 2026 and reported by the Financial Times on 3 October 2026. That is an increase of about 171% on the USD 63.2m reported for 2024.
Is that the same as Temu’s UK sales?
No. Whaleco UK Limited functions as a service and support entity rather than the merchant of record for British orders. Campaigners at the Fair Tax Foundation alleged in September 2025 that more than USD 750m of UK consumer sales had been booked through the group’s Irish company in the prior year, so the UK entity’s revenue line understates underlying British activity.
What is the GBP 135 low value import relief?
It is the UK relief that exempts imported goods valued at GBP 135 or less from customs duty. It is the reason a single low-cost item shipped direct from China to a British consumer currently arrives without a duty charge.
When does the UK relief end?
The government has set a target of October 2028, having pulled the date forward by six months from March 2029 on 23 June 2026. HMRC published its framework policy paper on 13 July 2026.
What is excluded from the change?
Excise goods, goods subject to import restrictions, trade defence measures or other customs reliefs, movements from Great Britain to Northern Ireland under the Windsor Framework, and consumer-to-consumer parcels valued at GBP 39 or less.
Will VAT on low-value imports change too?
Possibly. HMRC is assessing whether VAT collection should move away from the point of sale to align with the new customs process, and has acknowledged mixed views on the options. No decision has been announced.
What happened when the EU removed its equivalent relief?
The EU removed its EUR 150 duty relief on 1 July 2026 and added a flat per-parcel handling charge. China-origin parcel volumes into Belgium fell by about 53% and into the Netherlands by 46%, and Shein reported European revenue down 13.9% in the quarter that followed.
Could the Autumn Budget move the UK date again?
It could. The Budget is scheduled for 28 October 2026, and the government has already demonstrated willingness to accelerate the timetable once. Retail trade bodies have continued to press for an earlier removal.
How do the US, EU, UK and Japan compare today?
The US suspended its USD 800 de minimis exemption on 29 August 2025. The EU removed its EUR 150 relief on 1 July 2026. Japan’s ruling party has proposed abolishing the JPY 10,000 exemption so all imports face 10% consumption tax. The UK relief remains in force until the scheduled October 2028 removal, which makes Britain the current outlier.