Grading Companies Compared: Reading a Slab

By CardSpicy Founder · October 4, 2026

Quick answer

CardSpicy reads a slab’s label for what it actually says rather than for a familiar brand, because a Simplified Chinese card can arrive in a case from a grading company most collectors outside China have never heard of.

Every week, collectors outside China receive cards sealed in slabs from grading companies they have never heard of: a Simplified Chinese Pikachu arrives in a blue-labeled case marked CCIC, or a slab with the letters PCG, or a label that reads like a cousin of a Western brand. The card inside may be fine. The hard question is what the label is worth, and the honest answer is that it varies by a wide margin. This article compares the major grading companies first, then walks through the mainland Chinese labels one by one, and closes with a verification checklist you can run before you pay. One disclosure up front: we sell PSA 10 cards, and this article still names the cases where another label is the right tool.

Who owns whom now

The Western grading industry consolidated hard in the last two years. Collectors, the parent company of PSA, bought SGC in February 2024, and on 15 December 2025 announced an agreement to acquire Beckett, with Beckett continuing as an independent brand and its own grading standards. Collectors also owns the coin grader PCGS and the price-data platform Card Ladder. CGC, owned by Certified Collectibles Group, now stands as the major independent, and it has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and China. By the volume figures compiled by GemRate and cited in coverage of the deal, PSA graded over 18 million cards in 2025 against roughly 790,000 for Beckett, which gives a sense of how deep each resale base runs.

The major graders at a glance

All five grade on the familiar 1 to 10 scale and judge the same four things: centering, corners, edges and surface. What differs is how they publish their judgment, how easily you can verify a case, and how deep the resale market runs for each label.

Three practical differences sit behind that table. Liquidity: a PSA 10 of a given card usually sells fastest and at the highest average price, which is why resellers default to it; BGS holds a trophy tier with the Black Label, and CGC trades respectably at lower fees. Transparency: PSA, CGC, BGS and SGC all publish open certificate lookups, and the major ones publish population reports, so anyone can check how many copies exist at a grade. Consistency: no grader is a machine, and regraded cards do come back different; TAG is the interesting experiment here, grading by computer vision and publishing a defect-level report for every slab.

The mainland Chinese labels

Domestic card grading in China grew explosively after 2021, with fees reported around 15 to 23 RMB per card, a few dollars, against ten times that for an entry PSA tier once shipping is counted. Low prices produced hundreds of labels of very different quality. The structure of the market is visible in one number set: on the 2023 trade data published by a major Chinese card marketplace, PSA still held 52 percent of graded-card trades, the domestic label CCGrading held about 32 percent, BaoCui about 6 percent, and every other label combined about 8 percent. The five labels below are the ones a foreign buyer is most likely to encounter on Simplified Chinese cards.

CCIC: the state-backed label

CCIC is the card grading business of China Certification and Inspection Group, a state-owned inspection enterprise, and it has become the largest domestic grading brand. It grades on the familiar 10-point scale with a standard blue label and a distinctive gold label for its top grade, and collector guides report bulk submission prices of roughly two to six US dollars per card. Two things matter to a foreign buyer. First, verification runs through its WeChat mini program, which pulls up the record including images you can match against the slab; there is no English population report on the open web. Second, the price asymmetry is real: one widely shared collector report describes a gold-label CCIC 10 selling for around a third more than the equivalent PSA 10 on Chinese platforms, while in Western markets a CCIC 10 generally trades close to a raw near-mint card. Both statements can be true at once, because they describe two different groups of buyers. Treat the gold-label premium as an anecdote, and treat a CCIC slab offered to a Western audience as a raw card with a nice case unless you specifically collect the domestic market.

PCG: open standards, open lookup, one big trap

The Chinese PCG, whose Chinese name is Juka, is a private company registered in Shanghai in September 2022. It publishes its grading standards openly, including two tiers at the top of its scale, a black-gold Gem Mint 10 and a gold Gem Mint 10 with different centering tolerances, and unusually for a Chinese label it runs an open web certificate lookup where anyone can enter a certification number and pull up the record. The trap is the name. At least two unrelated Western companies also trade as PCG, Premier Card Grading and a Swedish grader called Professional Card Grading, so a listing that only says PCG tells you very little. Check which company actually issued the label, and use the certificate number, not the acronym, as your anchor. Also note the scale of the business: a company registered with one million RMB of capital in 2022 is a young, small firm, and its grade is a condition opinion worth reading, not a market standard.

CCGrading, BaoCui and Gongbo: the domestic volume labels

CCGrading, based in Chongqing, is the domestic label with the largest trade share on the Chinese marketplace data cited above, and it publishes its daily grading queue so submitters can see exactly where their cards sit. BaoCui and Gongbo both came out of the Chinese coin grading world and expanded into trading cards, which is a common path in the domestic industry; BaoCui markets slabs with ultraviolet protection. All three are real operating businesses with verification through their official channels. What they do not have is a Western resale base: Western price guides track PSA, and to a lesser degree BGS, CGC and SGC, and they do not track these labels at all, so a 10 from any of them has no public comp to lean on. Inside China that matters less; the labels trade daily on Chinese platforms with the grading fee arbitrage fully priced in.

How to check a Chinese slab before you pay

Run this list in order. It takes ten minutes and catches nearly everything.

Identify the issuing company from the label, not from the listing title. Write down the full name and the certification number.

Confirm the company is one you can verify. PCG Juka has an open web lookup; CCIC verifies in its WeChat mini program; CCGrading, BaoCui and Gongbo verify through their official sites. If the label names a company you cannot find at all, treat the slab as ungraded.

Pull up the certificate record and match it to the slab: card, set, grade and, where the record includes images, the card itself.

Inspect the case. Look for a functioning QR code where the label has one, clean case work, and no signs of the case having been opened and resealed.

Judge the card inside. A label claiming a perfect grade on a card with visible whitening or scratches is telling you the label is the problem, whatever the brand.

Price the card, not the label. Compare against the raw near-mint price and the PSA 10 price of the same card. If no comps exist for the label, the grade is a condition opinion and the price should sit near the raw level.

Regrade arithmetic: if the card looks gem mint, add the PSA fee and shipping to the asking price and see whether the PSA 10 comp leaves a margin. That margin, not the label it currently wears, is what you are buying.

Red flags

A few patterns should end the negotiation. A seller who cannot produce a certificate number. A label that imitates the design language of PSA or Beckett closely enough to confuse at a glance. A certification number that returns nothing on the issuer’s own lookup. A high-value card offered far under its raw near-mint price with a perfect grade on the label. And the quiet one: a real certificate on a real slab whose case has been opened, since labels can be transferred between cases, which is why matching the record images to the card in front of you is the step that closes the loop.

Where this leaves a foreign buyer

The labels are not the enemy, and several of them do honest work at prices Western graders cannot match. The working summary is short. PSA is the resale standard and prices accordingly. BGS, CGC, SGC and TAG are legitimate alternatives with published lookups, each with a narrower resale base. The mainland labels are real businesses whose grades travel badly: verify the certificate, judge the card, and pay raw-card prices for a label you cannot resell. Our reading rules for condition itself live in our grading guide.

Frequently asked questions

Are cards in Chinese slabs fake?

Usually no. The mainland labels we cover are real companies that really grade cards. The two separate risks are counterfeit cases that imitate a real label, and price: a genuine Chinese-labeled card generally resells for far less outside China than the same card in a PSA case. Verify the certificate, inspect the card, and price the card, not the label.

Is a CCIC 10 equal to a PSA 10?

Not in price. Inside China, CCIC carries real standing and one widely shared collector report describes its gold-label 10 selling above an equivalent PSA 10 on Chinese platforms; treat that figure as an anecdote. Outside China, a CCIC 10 typically trades closer to a raw near-mint card than to a PSA 10, because buyers cannot pull a population report and most do not recognize the label.

How do I verify a Chinese certificate from outside China?

PCG Juka runs an open web lookup where you enter the certification number. CCIC verifies through its WeChat mini program, which shows the record with images; if you cannot use WeChat, ask the seller for a screenshot of the verification screen and match the images to the slab. If a seller cannot or will not verify a certificate, walk away.

Is it worth cracking a card out of a Chinese slab and regrading with PSA?

It is a common route, and on a genuinely gem-mint card it can make sense because the PSA label carries the resale premium. It is not a free upgrade: regrading fees add up, the grade is not certain to come back 10, and opening any case risks damaging the card. Price the raw card honestly first and only regrade cards that look the part.

Sources

List of sources used

1. Collectors company announcement of 15 December 2025 on the agreement to acquire Beckett, and independent coverage of the same announcement.
2. Certified Collectibles Group news listing its office locations, including China.
3. Official websites of the grading companies named, read on 4 October 2026: PSA, Beckett, CGC, TAG, PCG Juka (pcgcard.cn, including its published grading standards and its certificate lookup page), CCGrading (cangcard.com), BaoCui (baocuicoin.com) and Gongbo (gongbocoins.com).
4. Company registration entry for the PCG Juka operating company, Shanghai, registered September 2022.
5. December 2024 Chinese market report on card grading by the Jingzhe Institute research desk, including marketplace-published 2023 trade shares for graded cards.
6. GemRate 2025 grading volume figures as cited in industry coverage of the Beckett acquisition.
7. English collector guides to CCIC slabs and to grading company comparisons, read on 4 October 2026.

Where to go next

• The CardSpicy card index — every card we track, with its PSA 10 population and market history (195 cards).
• The illustrator index — every artist behind those cards, card by card (110 artists).