CCTV Finds a Children's 'Myopia-Control' Lens Priced at 1,980 Yuan Wholesale for 30

In Danyang, Jiangsu — the city China calls its eyewear capital — a CCTV investigation has found the industry's clearest numbers yet: a children's multi-focal lens marketed for "myopia control," with a suggested retail price of 1,980 yuan, sells at wholesale for 30 yuan. The gap is a factor of about 66.

The mechanism is as simple as the arithmetic. Merchants in the city's wholesale market told the investigators that buyers can decide for themselves which brand to paste onto the lenses and which price tier to sell them at — meaning a single 30-yuan lens can leave the warehouse and become a several-hundred or thousand-yuan "control lens" on a retail shelf, depending only on the label chosen. Many of the mid-priced and high-priced control lenses sold to Chinese parents, the report found, come from exactly these lines.

The pricing is the visible half of the problem. The less visible half is efficacy. Genuine multi-focal ("defocus") lenses are optical devices: their claims rest on precise lens design and, in China's regulatory scheme, medical-device registration. A low-cost white-label product with a control claim pasted on may meet neither bar — a question the investigation raised and one that official reports in the same period, flagging counterfeit and unlicensed myopia-control lenses, have reinforced. Parents cannot distinguish them by looking; the packaging rarely says.

Between wholesale and the price tag sits an old industry habit: set the list price high, then sell at 30 or 50 percent off, so the discount feels like a bargain. The industry's defense is that stores carry real costs — rent, equipment, and the optometry exam — and net margins of roughly 8 to 10 percent. That may be true of the retail end. But the investigation's point is upstream of it: with a 66-fold gap between factory and list price, the markup is not being absorbed by optometrists' wages, and the "suggested retail price" is a fiction that frames a 30-yuan lens as an expensive medical product.

Nothing in the story suggests parents are wrong to want myopia control for their children — the demand is real, and genuine defocus lenses do exist. The exposure is about what happens in the gap: a market where the label, not the lens, sets the price, and where the one thing a parent is paying for — the control claim — is the one thing hardest to verify. The practical advice the report left readers with: compare prices across channels before buying, and check the medical-device registration number on the packaging rather than the suggested retail price.