Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) founder Jack Ma (馬雲) said Chinese-made counterfeit goods today have gotten better than the genuine article, complicating the effort to root out fakes on the nation’s largest online shopping services.
Global brands have long relied on China and other low-cost manufacturing bases to beef up margins. However, those same factories have gotten savvier over the years and are now using the Internet — including Alibaba’s platforms — to sell their own products straight to consumers, Ma told a company investors’ conference yesterday. Still, Alibaba is the best in the world at fighting the sale of counterfeits, he added.
“The problem is that the fake products today, they make better quality, better prices than the real products, the real names,” Ma said in Hangzhou, China. “It is not the fake products that destroy them, it is the new business models.”
“The exact factories, the exact raw materials, but they do not use their names,” he added.
Failing to clean up online bazaars like Taobao (淘寶) could alienate merchants and shoppers abroad, particularly at a time when Alibaba is drawing scrutiny from both investors and international brands over its reputation as a haven for knock-offs. Its membership in the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a non-profit global organization that fights counterfeit products and piracy, was last month suspended after questions were raised about conflicts of interest involving the coalition’s president. That was after its inclusion in the group irked some members, who said the company was not going far enough to cull fakes from its marketplaces.
Right or wrong, Ma’s comments on the caliber of counterfeits might not sit well with those trying to tackle an endemic problem that has tarred China’s image abroad.
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