The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) yesterday fined Hitachi Taiwan for false advertising after the company claimed in its product catalog that its air conditioning units were the “No. 1 in the industry” for quietness.
Hitachi Japan’s catalog of four-way cassette-type indoor air conditioning systems claims that its units are the best in the industry for sound absorption and silent operation, commission vice chairman Shih Hui-fen (施惠芬) said.
The sound absorption performance, however, is only “No. 1” in some of the models advertised in the catalog, not all of them, Shih said.
In the catalog for two-way cassette-type indoor air conditioning systems, the firm claimed the products could absorb the sound of a 2.5-horsepower unit to produce only 38 A-weighted decibels — the lowest levels on the market.
The commission said, however, that according to its inspections, the Hitachi units were not the quietest on the market.
“[Hitachi] uses words such as ‘first’ and ‘lowest,’ but has no hard evidence to back its claims,” Shih said.
“This violates the Fair Trade Act [公平交易法] as it constitutes false advertising,” she said.
The commission ordered the company to immediately remove the information from its advertisements and fined it NT$600,000.
Hitachi Taiwan said it would not respond until it had received the official documents from the FTC.
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