A staff member works on the face mask production line (Xinhua/Deng Hua)

Foreign-branded face masks including ones made by Honeywell, PITTA, Rolevin and Dr. Hoffmann were in the latest list of sub-quality masks revealed by the Beijing authorities, causing quality concerns among Chinese consumers over foreign medical supplies.

Honeywell responded on Thursday, saying that its disqualified masks were an old type and are no longer in production.

Beijing market supervisors publicized a list of 18 masks that failed to pass a sample inspection on Wednesday, at least four of which are foreign, the Economic Daily reported on Thursday.

Supervisors said they found an "unqualified label" problem on the inspected batch of US enterprise Honeywell's Anti-PM2.5 face masks named "H930," which were produced in Shanghai in September 2018.

Honeywell explained to the media on Thursday that the "unqualified label" refers to the lack of a description of storage conditions in the mask's packaging.

The label problem is irrelevant to the quality of this batch of masks, a Honeywell staffer told the Global Times on Thursday. "We Honeywell employees in China also wear our mask products," she said.

British brand Rolevin's "0081S" masks made in East China's Hubei Province were disqualified over "filtration efficiency" and "protection effect" in the inspection. 

The brand's service hotline told the Global Times that the masks have no quality problems. "They were disqualified because inspectors used a different standard," explained the hotline staffer, saying that customers can return the masks they bought and get their money back.

The staffer didn't give more details about the differences between the company's production standard and the Beijing authority's inspection standard.

It is not the first time that foreign-branded masks in the Chinese market have been involved in quality problems. By the end of June, a total of 680,000 masks had been recalled by local drug administrators in provinces such as Fujian, Chongqing and Jiangxi because of quality problems, some of which were foreign-branded ones including Honeywell's, reported Southern Metropolis Daily on June 29.

The latest exposure of quality problems has once again caused worries among Chinese customers about foreign goods, and some netizens said that foreign producers of low-quality products should apologize and quit the Chinese market.

"It's ridiculous that some countries complain about Chinese masks but turn a blind eye to their own products," wrote a user on Weibo.