The global luxury seafood trade has become a major driver of marine overexploitation, with surging demand from East Asia placing intense fishing pressure worldwide. Despite growing recognition of serial depletion, previous studies have examined seafood trade commodities in isolation and relied almost exclusively on single-hub analyses, leaving critical gaps in understanding the integrated, multi-jurisdictional dynamics of the complex trade. This study provides the first comprehensive multi-commodity and multi-hub analysis of luxury seafood shark fin, fish maw, and sea cucumber across the five dominant consumer markets and entrepôts—Hong Kong SAR, Mainland China, Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan Province between 2018 and 2024. Synthesising corrected customs data, we quantify the sector at an annual average value of 1.4 billion USD with an annual throughput exceeding 16,664 tonnes. Our results reveal a dual trade profile: highly dispersed sourcing for dried products (involving over 100 jurisdictions) contrasted with an increasingly consolidated industrial supply chain for frozen shark fins. Hong Kong SAR remains the primary global gateway for most dried commodities accounting for 62% of all dried product imports. Notably, shark fin trade volumes have declined by more than 43 % since 2018, while fish maw and sea cucumber have now surpassed shark fin in both economic value and traded volume, indicating a clear substitution dynamic in which regulatory pressure on one high-profile commodity redirects demand toward less-protected taxa. This geographic and taxonomic shift exacerbates overexploitation while eroding transparency, as the non-dried product trade in Mainland China lacks the accurate and mandatory custom reporting system that exist in Hong Kong SAR. To address these evolving pathways of exploitation, we propose a novel route-centric conservation framework that treats shark fin, fish maw, and sea cucumber as a single, integrated luxury seafood complex. Only through continuous monitoring of the full spectrum of product forms (dried, frozen, and prepared) across multiple trade hubs can we move beyond reactive, species-specific interventions toward proactive and effective conservation in this dynamic global market.
 

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